Error reading settings.xml

Question

Hi

I wanted to run maven commands from the command line.

While running mvn commands , getting the error-

Error reading settings.xml: only whitespace content allowed before start tag and not \ufffd (position: START_DOCUMENT seen \ufffd... @1:1) 
  Line:   1
  Column: 1

what is the problem with my settings.xml ?

Answer 1

This can happen if you've opened and saved your settings.xml from a non-text editor, which can add some non-printing characters to the file.

Try copying all the content and pasting into a new file using a text editor then renaming the file to settings.xml.

Answer 2

Do you use multiple character sets in your text editor? You might have saved the text in UTF8 or a UTF16 format. Open in a text editor that supports changing the character encoding and save it as plain ASCII, or ANSI or whatever the normal 7bit scheme is called in that editor.