Fatal Error The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed

I am getting the following exception while parsing my xml using dom parser. The url "http://www.xyz.com/ABC.aspx?accessCode=......&vin=GJHHFJHFJHFGF6788&reportType=3" returns a xml for every vin parameter.

Here is the xml returned by above url

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<VINdecode Version="1.0.0" Report_Type="LITE" Date="11/1/2012">
    <VIN Number="GJHHFJHFJHFGF6788" Status="SUCCESS">
        <Vehicle VINdecode_Vehicle_ID="26870" Model_Year="2004" Make="Volkswagen" Model="Touareg" Trim_Level="V6">
            <Item Key="Model Year" Value="2004" Unit="" />
            <Item Key="Make" Value="Volkswagen" Unit="" />
            <Item Key="Model" Value="Touareg" Unit="" />
            <Item Key="Trim Level" Value="V6" Unit="" />
            <Item Key="Manufactured in" Value="GERMANY" Unit="" />
            <Item Key="Body Style" Value="SPORT UTILITY 2-DR" Unit="" />
            <Item Key="Engine Type" Value="3.2L V6 DOHC 24V" Unit="" />
        </Vehicle>
    </VIN>
</VINdecode>

Here is the code which i use to parse xml returned from the url with vin.

 public VIN getVINExpansion(String vin) 
    {
        if(vin.length() != 17)
           return null;
        VIN vehicle = null;

        try 
        {

               String url="http://www.xyz.com/ABC.aspx?accessCode=........&vin="
                    + vin + "&reportType=3";
               DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
               DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
               Document doc = db.parse(url);  **// I get Exception in this line**
               NodeList vinlist = doc.getElementsByTagName("VIN");

               // rest goes here

         }
         catch(Exception e)
         {
           e.printStackTrace();
         }
        return vin;
    }

When I pass a "vin" parameter to above function from my client side through rpc call, I get correct response. But after few hours (say 4-5) hours when I pass the same vin parameter,I get exception. After that I keep on getting this exception till i restart my tomcat server. After restarting tomcat server, again i get correct response for 4-5 hours till it starts failing.

Exception I get :

[Fatal Error] xml_ABC.aspx?accessCode=.......&vin=GJHHFJHFJHFGF6788&reportType=3:4:6: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException;


 systemId: http://www.xyz.com/ABC.aspx?accessCode=......&vin=GJHHFJHFJHFGF6788&reportType=3; lineNumber: 4; columnNumber: 6; The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.
        at org.apache.xerces.parsers.DOMParser.parse(Unknown Source)
        at org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(Unknown Source)
        at javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(DocumentBuilder.java:177)

Solution

I don't know the exact reason why it is failing but the same problem was with me: When I was trying to parse url response xml using DocumentBuilder.parse(url), parsing fails after few trials.

When I fetched response xml using the following function:

public String getHttpGetResponseString(String url) throws Exception
    {
        HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        String responseBody ="";
        try {
            HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(url);

            System.out.println("executing request " + httpget.getURI());

            // Create a response handler
            ResponseHandler<String> responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
            responseBody = httpclient.execute(httpget, responseHandler);


        }
        finally {
            // When HttpClient instance is no longer needed,
            // shut down the connection manager to ensure
            // immediate deallocation of all system resources
            httpclient.getConnectionManager().shutdown();

        }
        return responseBody;
    }

And then loaded the xml into dom, i got rid of the exception. Hope this may solve your problem.