An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0xc) was found

Question

Parsing an XML file using the Java DOM parser results in:

[Fatal Error] os__flag_8c.xml:103:135: An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0xc) was found in the ele         


        

Answer 1

You can filter all 'invalid' chars with a custom FilterReader class:

public class InvalidXmlCharacterFilter extends FilterReader {

    protected InvalidXmlCharacterFilter(Reader in) {
        super(in);
    }

    @Override
    public int read(char[] cbuf, int off, int len) throws IOException {
        int read = super.read(cbuf, off, len);
        if (read == -1) return read;

        for (int i = off; i < off + read; i++) {
            if (!XMLChar.isValid(cbuf[i])) cbuf[i] = '?';
        }
        return read;
    }
}

And run it like this:

InputStream fileStream = new FileInputStream(xmlFile);
Reader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fileStream, charset));
InvalidXmlCharacterFilter filter = new InvalidXmlCharacterFilter(reader);
InputSource is = new InputSource(filter);
xmlReader.parse(is);