I use XStream with DomDriver to serialize and deserialize a DefaultStyledDocument object, so I save and retrieve it's state in a database. The serialization part goes well, but when it tries to deserialize, an excetption is thrown:
[Fatal Error] :92:51: Character reference "&# Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.StreamException: : Character reference "&#
I believe &# is the space character in the document.
I even tried using a different driver like: StaxDriver, JsonHierarchicalStreamDriver and JettisonMappedXmlDriver, but had no luck.
What am I doing wrong here?
Here's my code:
DefaultStyledDocument doc = new DefaultStyledDocument();
//initialize doc
XStream xmlstream = new XStream(new StaxDriver());
String xml = xmlstream.toXML(doc);
//save 'xml' in database
//select from database
DefaultStyledDocument document = (defaultStyledDocument) xmlstream.fromXML(result.getString(1));
//this is where the exception is thrown.
EDIT Actually &# is not a space character, because now i see that the space character is represented by " ". &# seems to be the not edited (empty) part of the document. It's really annoying that is serializes it, but doesn't deserialize it back.
Given the XML snippet you provided in the comments above, the error message is correct - there are certain characters that are forbidden from appearing in XML 1.0 documents by the spec even as character references, and U+0000 is one of these characters. Thus � is not well-formed XML and the parser is right to reject it. The serializer is clearly being more lenient in allowing it to be written.
I would suggest you explore other non-XML ways to represent this data in your database, maybe as a BLOB (using Java object serialization) or similar.