CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaxml
sentinel
sentinel

Reputation: 41

Xalan's SAX implementation - double encoding entities in string

I'm using Sax with xalan implementation (v. 2.7.2). I have string in html format 

" <p>Test k&quot;nnen</p>"

and I have to pass it to content of xml tag.

The result is:

"&lt;p&gt;Test k&amp;quot;nnen&lt;/p&gt;"

xalan encodes the ampersand sign although it's a part of already escaped entity. Anyone knows a way how to make xalan understand escaped entities and not escape their ampersand?

One of possible solution is to add startCDATA() to transformerHandler but It's not something can use in my code.

public class TestSax{


public static void main(String[] args) throws TransformerConfigurationException, SAXException {
    TestSax t = new TestSax();

    System.out.println(t.createSAXXML());
}

public String createSAXXML() throws SAXException, TransformerConfigurationException {
    Writer writer = new StringWriter( );
    StreamResult streamResult = new StreamResult(writer);

    SAXTransformerFactory transformerFactory =
            (SAXTransformerFactory) SAXTransformerFactory.newInstance( );
    String data = null;
    TransformerHandler transformerHandler =
            transformerFactory.newTransformerHandler( );

    transformerHandler.setResult(streamResult);
    transformerHandler.startDocument( );
    transformerHandler.startElement(null,"decimal","decimal", null);

    data = " <p>Test k&quot;nnen</p>";
    transformerHandler.characters(data.toCharArray(),0,data.length( ));
    transformerHandler.endElement(null,"decimal","decimal");
    transformerHandler.endDocument( );

    return writer.toString( );
}}

Upvotes: 0

Views: 126

Answers (1)

Michael Kay
Michael Kay

Reputation: 163352

If your input is XML, then you need to parse it. Then <p> and </p> will be recognized as tags, and &quot; will be recognized as an entity reference.

On the other hand if you want to treat it as a string and pass it through XML machinery, then "<" and "&" are going to be preserved as ordinary characters, which means they will be escaped as &lt; and &amp; respectively.

If you want "<" treated as an ordinary character but "&" treated with its XML meaning, then you need software with some kind of split personality, and you're not going to get that off-the-shelf.

Upvotes: 1

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