this code: &#x3, an invalid XML character error.

[Kaidi]

Hello guys,
I get the "an invalid XML character" error when using xerces to parse a XML file. I know that XML will correspond the &, <, >, " to special strings like "&gt;&lt;". However, how about if the XML file really needs to contain some text like: ""? (as content of a tag)

The story is:
I am writing a program to parse some XML files from another program. In that program, it graps webpages, and saves the pages' URLs and content into a XML file, something like (for each webpage):

<pageurl>http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/agridatasets.jar</pageurl> <pagecontent> the_page_HTML_content </pagecontent>

This works fine since that program will replace &, <, > etc with &lt; etc.

However, some web urls point to files: .zip, .pdf file, etc. The program just "prints" the .pdf content as text and puts it in the XML file. In this case, the content of <pagecontent> will look like:

PKÈR&lt;+&#
......
(Just think what you will see if you open a .pdf file in notepad!)

In this way, when I use a XML parser (xerces) to parse it, it will get errors like:

FATAL: line 5079: Character reference "&#x3" is an invalid XML character. org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Character reference "&#x3" is an invalid XML character. at org.apache.xerces.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.createSAXParseException(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.fatalError(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLScanner.reportFatalError(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLScanner.scanCharReferenceValue(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanCharReference(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDispatcher.dispatch(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XMLParser.parse(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(Unknown Source)

So, any idea how I can make it work?
How can I tell the xerces parser to ignore the "&xx;" pairs (except those for <,>,", etc) and parse them just as plain text?

Thanks a lot.

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

% I get the "an invalid XML character" error when using xerces to parse % a XML file. I know that XML will correspond the &, <, >, " to special % strings like "&gt;&lt;". However, how about if the XML file really % needs to contain some text like: ""? (as % content of a tag)

The only valid characters in an XML file are the non-control code points from Unicode, tab, carriage-return, and line-feed. Even if you enter them as numeric entity references, other control characters (such as ) are not allowed. I suggest encoding binary data using one of the schemes recognised in mime, such as quoted-printable (for text with the odd control character) or base64.

% However, some web urls point to files: .zip, .pdf file, etc. The % program just "prints" the .pdf content as text and puts it in the XML % file. In this case, the content of <pagecontent> will look like:

For these, use base64.

 

[Johannes Koch]

The
program just "prints" the .pdf content as text and puts it in the XML file. In this case, the content of <pagecontent> will look like:

PKÈR&lt;+&#
......
(Just think what you will see if you open a .pdf file in notepad!)

In this way, when I use a XML parser (xerces) to parse it,

Why do you want to parse PDF with an XML parser? When downloading the resources, you may store the content-type and make XML pasring dependent on the content-type.

 

[Kaidi]

Why do you want to parse PDF with an XML parser? When downloading the resources, you may store the content-type and make XML pasring dependent on the content-type.

yes, if let me write the whole program, I will do that way. The problem is: the existing program (which I can not change) is doing that way: it just put .jar/pdf, etc. into one XML file. I need to process this XML file. :-(