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

I faced a similar issue where XML was containing control characters. After looking into the code, I found that a deprecated class,StringBufferInputStream, was used for reading string content.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/io/StringBufferInputStream.html

This class does not properly convert characters into bytes. As of JDK 1.1, the preferred way to create a stream from a string is via the StringReader class.

I changed it to ByteArrayInputStream and it worked fine.

Answer 2

For people who are reading byte array into String and trying to convert to object with JAXB, you can add "iso-8859-1" encoding by creating String from byte array like this:

String JAXBallowedString= new String(byte[] input, "iso-8859-1");

This would replace the conflicting byte to single-byte encoding which JAXB can handle. Obviously this solution is only to parse the xml.

Answer 3

public String stripNonValidXMLCharacters(String in) {
    StringBuffer out = new StringBuffer(); // Used to hold the output.
    char current; // Used to reference the current character.

    if (in == null || ("".equals(in))) return ""; // vacancy test.
    for (int i = 0; i < in.length(); i++) {
        current = in.charAt(i); // NOTE: No IndexOutOfBoundsException caught here; it should not happen.
        if ((current == 0x9) ||
            (current == 0xA) ||
            (current == 0xD) ||
            ((current >= 0x20) && (current <= 0xD7FF)) ||
            ((current >= 0xE000) && (current <= 0xFFFD)) ||
            ((current >= 0x10000) && (current <= 0x10FFFF)))
            out.append(current);
    }
    return out.toString();
}    

Answer 4

Whenever invalid xml character comes xml, it gives such error. When u open it in notepad++ it look like VT, SOH,FF like these are invalid xml chars. I m using xml version 1.0 and i validate text data before entering it in database by pattern

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[^\u0009\u000A\u000D\u0020-\uD7FF\uE000-\uFFFD\u10000-\u10FFF]+"); 
retunContent = p.matcher(retunContent).replaceAll("");

It will ensure that no invalid special char will enter in xml

Answer 5

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);

Answer 6

Today, I've got a similar error:

Servlet.service() for servlet [remoting] in context with path [/***] threw exception [Request processing failed; nested exception is java.lang.RuntimeException: buildDocument failed.] with root cause org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 19; columnNumber: 91; An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0xc) was found in the value of attribute "text" and element is "label".

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After my first encouter with the error, I had re-typed the entire line by hand, so that there was no way for a special character to creep in, and Notepad++ didn't show any non-printable characters (black on white), nevertheless I got the same error over and over.

When I looked up what I've done different than my predecessors, it turned out it was one additional space just before the closing /> (as I've heard was recommended for older parsers, but it shouldn't make any difference anyway, by the XML standards):

<label text="this label's text" layout="cell 0 0, align left" />

When I removed the space:

<label text="this label's text" layout="cell 0 0, align left"/>

everything worked just fine.

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So it's definitely a misleading error message.