How can I get it to parse XML contained within a String instead of a file?

 public static Document loadXMLFromString(String xml) throws Exception
    {
        DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
        InputSource is = new InputSource(new StringReader(xml));
        return builder.parse(is);
    }

Comparing StAX to Other JAXP APIs

As an API in the JAXP family, StAX can be compared, among other APIs, to SAX, TrAX, and JDOM. Of the latter two, StAX is not as powerful or flexible as TrAX or JDOM, but neither does it require as much memory or processor load to be useful, and StAX can, in many cases, outperform the DOM-based APIs. The same arguments outlined above, weighing the cost/benefits of the DOM model versus the streaming model, apply here.

With this in mind, the closest comparisons between can be made between StAX and SAX, and it is here that StAX offers features that are beneficial in many cases; some of these include: