org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog

Question

I have a Java based web service client connected to Java web service (implemented on the Axis1 framework).

I am getting following exception in my log file:

Answer 1

I had the same problem (and solved it) while trying to parse an XML document with freemarker.

I had no spaces before the header of XML file.

The problem occurs when and only when the file encoding and the XML encoding attribute are different. (ex: UTF-8 file with UTF-16 attribute in header).

So I had two ways of solving the problem:

1. changing the encoding of the file itself
2. changing the header UTF-16 to UTF-8