Stripping Invalid XML characters in Java

Question

I have an XML file that\'s the output from a database. I\'m using the Java SAX parser to parse the XML and output it in a different format. The XML contains some invalid c

Answer 1

I have a similar problem when parsing content of an Australian export tariffs into an XML document. I cannot use solutions suggested here such as: - Use an external tool (a jar) invoked from command line. - Ask Australian Customs to clean up the source file.

The only method to solve this problem at the moment is to iterate through the entire content of the source file, character by character and test if each character does not belong to the ascii range 0x00 to 0x1F inclusively. It can be done, but I was wondering if there is a better way using Java methods for type String.

EDIT I found a solution that may be useful to others: Use Java method String#ReplaceAll to replace or remove any undesirable characters in XML document.

Example code (I removed some necessary statements to avoid clutter):

BufferedReader reader = null;
...
String line = reader.readLine().replaceAll("[\\x00-\\x1F]", "");

In this example I remove (i.e. replace with an empty string), non-printable characters within range 0x00 to 0x1F inclusively. You can change the second argument in method #replaceAll() to replace characters with the string your application requires.