Parsing an XML file without root in Java

Question

I have this XML file which doesn't have a root node. Other than manually adding a "fake" root element, is there any way I would be able to parse an XML file in Java? Thanks.

Answer 1

Your XML document needs a root xml element to be considered well formed. Without this you will not be able to parse it with an xml parser.

Answer 2

One way is to provide your own dummy wrapper without touching the original 'xml' (the not well formed 'xml') Need the word for that:

Syntax

<!DOCTYPE some_root_elem SYSTEM "/home/ego/some.dtd"
[
  <!ENTITY entity-name "Some value to be inserted at the entity">
]

Example:

<!DOCTYPE dummy [
<!ENTITY data SYSTEM "http://wherever-my-data-is"&gt;
]>
<dummy>
&data;
</dummy>

Answer 3

I think even if any API would have an option for this, it will only return you the first node of the "XML" which will look like a root and discard the rest.

So the answer is probably to do it yourself. Scanner or StringTokenizer might do the trick.

Maybe some html parsers might help, they are usually less strict.

Answer 4

I suppose you could create a new implementation of InputStream that wraps the one you'll be parsing from. This implementation would return the bytes of the opening root tag before the bytes from the wrapped stream and the bytes of the closing root tag afterwards. That would be fairly simple to do.

I may be faced with this problem too. Legacy code, eh?

Ian.

Edit: You could also look at java.io.SequenceInputStream which allows you to append streams to one another. You would need to put your prefix and suffix in byte arrays and wrap them in ByteArrayInputStreams but it's all fairly straightforward.