Handling XML escape characters (e.g. quotes) using JAXB Marshaller

Question

I need to serialize an XML java object to a XML file using the JAXB Marshaller (JAXB version 2.2). Now in the xml object, I have a tag which contains String value

Answer 1

With JAXB marshaller if you want full control over which characters to escape(e.g. "\'") you will have to add property :

Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller();
marshaller.setProperty(CharacterEscapeHandler.class.getName(), new CustomCharacterEscapeHandler());

and create a new CustomCharacterEscapeHandler class

import com.sun.xml.bind.marshaller.CharacterEscapeHandler;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Writer;

public class CustomCharacterEscapeHandler implements CharacterEscapeHandler {

    public CustomCharacterEscapeHandler() {
        super();
    }

    public void escape(char[] ch, int start, int length, boolean isAttVal, Writer out) throws IOException {
        // avoid calling the Writerwrite method too much by assuming
        // that the escaping occurs rarely.
        // profiling revealed that this is faster than the naive code.
        int limit = start+length;
        for (int i = start; i < limit; i++) {
            char c = ch[i];
            if(c == '&' || c == '<' || c == '>' || c == '\'' || (c == '\"' && isAttVal) ) {
                if(i!=start)
                    out.write(ch,start,i-start);
                start = i+1;
                switch (ch[i]) {
                    case '&':
                        out.write("&");
                        break;
                    case '<':
                        out.write("<");
                        break;
                    case '>':
                        out.write(">");
                        break;
                    case '\"':
                        out.write(""");
                        break;
                    case '\'':
                        out.write("'");
                        break;
                }
            }
        }

        if( start!=limit )
            out.write(ch,start,limit-start);
    }
}

Hope that helps.