Unable to unesape consecutive escape char in org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils.unescapeXml()

Question

Unable to unescape consecutive escape char like <errors>. Below is the sample code:

    String error = "<errors>";
    String out = org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils.unescapeXml(error);
    System.out.println(out);

Current Output: <errors>

Expected output: <errors>

This code ran on JDK 11.0.16 version and commons-lang3-3.4.jar version.

Answer 1

You need to unescape the String as many times as the input String has been escaped.

var input = "<errors>";
var output = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeXml(input);
output = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeXml(output);
System.out.println(output);