Illegal character - CTRL-CHAR

Question

I am getting following exceptopn from webservices:

com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxUnexpectedCharException: Illegal character ((CTRL-CHAR, code 15))

Answer 1

This error is being thrown by the Woodstox XML parser. The source code from the InputBootstrapper class looks like this:

protected void reportUnexpectedChar(int i, String msg)
    throws WstxException
{
    char c = (char) i;
    String excMsg;

    // WTF? JDK thinks null char is just fine as?!
    if (Character.isISOControl(c)) {
        excMsg = "Unexpected character (CTRL-CHAR, code "+i+")"+msg;
    } else {
        excMsg = "Unexpected character '"+c+"' (code "+i+")"+msg;
    }
    Location loc = getLocation();
    throw new WstxUnexpectedCharException(excMsg, loc, c);
}

Amusing comment aside, the Woodstox is performing some additional validation on top of the JDK parser, and is rejecting the ASCII character 15 as invalid.

As to why that character is there, we can't tell you that, it's in your data. Similarly, we can't tell you if removing that character will break anything, since again, it's your data. You can only establish that for yourself.