CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaxmljakarta-eeescapingdom4j
RoD
RoD

Reputation: 464

Best practise to escape XML characters?

I've got html datas that i'm converting into a Dom4J document.

I've met an error:

org.dom4j.DocumentException: Error on line 1 of document  : Reference is not allowed in prolog. Nested exception: Reference is not allowed in prolog.
    at org.dom4j.io.SAXReader.read(SAXReader.java:482)
    at org.dom4j.DocumentHelper.parseText(DocumentHelper.java:278)
    at MonTest.main(MonTest.java:21)
Nested exception: 
    org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Reference is not allowed in prolog.

It was a character "&" that i needed to escape into & amp; in order to build the document.

In XML, it seems that we need to escape 5 characters: (gt, lt, quot, amp, apos)

Nevertheless, how can i escape it, without escaping it into the "nodes" elements:

<div id="test" class='toto'>A&A<A"A</div>

should give:

<div id="test" class='toto'>A&amp;A&lt;A&quot;A</div>

and not

&lt;div id=&quot;test&quot; class=&apos;toto&apos;&gt;A&amp;A&lt;A&quot;A&lt;/div&gt;

Thank you,

Upvotes: 1

Views: 6689

Answers (2)

forty-two
forty-two

Reputation: 12817

I would have a look at using a lenient HTML XMLReader instead of the default XMLReader implementation. Something like tag soup or html tidy.

Upvotes: 2

Piotr Gwiazda
Piotr Gwiazda

Reputation: 12222

Escape strings before adding to XML document. Use StringEscapeUtils.escapeXml method from Apache Commons Lang. Use some library to build XML e.g. http://code.google.com/p/joox/.

Upvotes: 7

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