The API I need to work with does not support xpath, which is a bit of a headache! :-( lol

The xml I want to parse is as a String. My questions:

1. Is there a Java equivalent of "simplexml_load_string", where it makes the string into an xml document for parsing?
2. Which is better for parsing, SAX or DOM? I need to get a couple of values out of the XML and the structure isn't that deep. [3 levels]

Thanks!