👀 Views: 76 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-14

java xml parsing exception-handling Java

Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy. I've hit a wall trying to I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm working on parsing an XML file containing special characters like `&`, `<`, and `>` in Java using the `javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder`. However, I'm working with issues where these characters are not being correctly interpreted, leading to malformed XML exceptions. The XML looks something like this: ```xml <items> <item> <description>This item costs $10 & includes a book</description> </item> </items> ``` When I try to parse this using the following code snippet: ```java import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory; import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder; import org.w3c.dom.Document; public class XMLParser { public static void main(String[] args) { try { File inputFile = new File("path/to/input.xml"); DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document doc = dBuilder.parse(inputFile); doc.getDocumentElement().normalize(); System.out.println("Root element: " + doc.getDocumentElement().getNodeName()); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } } ``` I receive the following behavior message: ``` org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 4; columnNumber: 45; The entity "&" was referenced, but not declared. ``` I've tried replacing `&` with `&amp;`, but I don't have control over the XML input and need to handle parsing dynamically. I've also considered using `org.xml.sax.InputSource` with a custom entity resolver to replace these characters on the fly, but I'm unsure how to implement that effectively. Has anyone faced a similar scenario, or can someone suggest a robust method for parsing XML with such special characters in Java without pre-processing the input? For context: I'm using Java on Ubuntu. What's the best practice here? This is happening in both development and production on Windows 11. I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Java. What's the correct way to implement this?