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javaxmlparsingsaxparser

Close an open XML element tag, programmatically in java

I have an XML string as response from server with some open tags, like: Example:

<Address1><Street>This caused error coz street is not closed</Address1>
<Address2>This displayed normal</Address2>

while i was parsing above xml string, i got, org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The element type "Street" must be gathered.

Note: I Can't Change Server Files.

Solution

  • First, I do not think you should work with invalid XML because it will lead to unpredictable results. The best for you is to update the server files to have valid XML content.

    That being said, you can use Jsoup which is an HTML parser that can help to manage such invalid XML.

    For your provided example:

    String xml = "<Address1><Street>This caused error coz street is not closed</Address1><Address2>This displayed normal</Address2>";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(xml, "", Parser.xmlParser());
Elements elements = doc.getElementsByTag("Address1");
System.out.println(elements.first().text());
// it will print: "This caused error coz street is not closed"
Elements elements2 = doc.getElementsByTag("Address2");
System.out.println(elements2.first().text());
// it will print: "This displayed normal"

    The Street element will simply be ignored.