Invalid character '&#x0' encountered

Question

Hi, I am getting following exception while parsing the xml.

Fatal error at line -1  Invalid character '&#x0' encountered. No stack trace

I have Xml data in string format and I am parsing it using DOM parser. I am parsing data which is a response from Java server to a Blackberry client. I also tried parsing with SAX parser,but problem is not resolved. Please help.

Answer 1

Smells like you're trying to parse an empty string as XML. Have you verified that the client is being given a good response?

Answer 2

InputStream xml = new ByteArrayInputStream(xmlData.getBytes());
DocumentBuilderFactory docBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder docBuilder = docBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = docBuilder.parse(xml);
doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
xml.close();

Above is the code I am using for parsing.

Answer 3

Your code currently calls getBytes() using the platform default encoding - that's very rarely a good idea. Find out what the encoding of the data really is, and use that. (It's likely to be UTF-8.)

If the Blackberry includes DocumentBuilder.parse(InputSource), that would be preferable:

DocumentBuilderFactory docBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); 
DocumentBuilder docBuilder = docBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
StringReader reader = new StringReader(xmlData);
try {
    Document doc = docBuilder.parse(xml); 
    doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
} finally {
    reader.close();
}

If that doesn't work, have a very close look at your string, e.g. like this:

for (int i=0; i < xmlData.length(); i++) {
    // Use whatever logging you have on the Blackberry
    System.out.println((int) xmlData.charAt(i));
}

It's possible that the problem is reading the response from the server - if you're reading it badly, you could have Unicode nulls (\u0000) in your string, which may not appear obviously in log/debug output, but would cause the error you've shown.

EDIT: I've just seen that you're getting the base64 data in the first place - so why convert it to a string and then back to bytes? Just decode the base64 to a byte array and then use that as the basis of your ByteArrayInputStream. Then you never have to deal with a text encoding in the first place.

Answer 4

What character encoding are you using? Could it be that Unicode is used and the BOM is sent at the beginning?

Answer 5

You have a null character in your character stream, i.e. char(0) which is not valid in an XML-document. If this is not present in the original string, then it is most likely a character decoding issue.

Answer 6

Hey All,

I got the solution,

I just trimmed it with trim() and it worked perfectly fine with me.

:-)

Thanks a lot to you all,for your solutions,which guided me towards solution.

Thanks again. itsteju