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javaxmlencodingutf-8iso-8859-1

  in XML making it unparseable

So I have a value in my database which has a non breaking space in the form   in it. I have a legacy service which reads this string from the database and creates an XML using this string. The issue I am facing is that the XML returned for this message is un-parseable. When I open it in notepad++ I see the character xA0 in the place of the non breaking space, and on removing this character the XML becomes parseable. Furthermore I have older revisions of this XML file from the same service which have the character "Â " in place of the non breaking space. I recently changed the tomcat server on which the service was running, and something has gone wrong because of it. I found this post according to which my XML is encoded to ISO-8859-1; but the code which I use to convert the XML to string does not use ISO-8859-1;. Below is my code

private String nodeToString(Node node) {
        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();

        try {
            Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
            t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "no");
            t.transform(new DOMSource(node), new StreamResult(sw));


        } catch (TransformerException te) {
            LOG.error("Exception during String to XML transformation ", te);
        }
        return sw.toString();

    }

I want to know why is my XML un-parseable and why is there a "Â " in the older revisions of the XML file.

Here is the image of the problematic character in notepad++ image in notepad++

Also when I open my XML in notepad and try to save it I see the encoding type is ANSI, when I change it to UTF-8 and then save it the XML becomes parseable.

New Info - Enforcing UTF-8 with transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-8"); did not work I am still getting the xA0 in my XML.

Solution

  • The issue was that my version of java was somehow saving my file in ANSI file format. I saw this when I opened my file in notepad, and tried to save it. The older files were in UTF-8 format. So all I did was specify UTF-8 encoding while writing my file.

    Writer out = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(
                new FileOutputStream(fileName.trim()), StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
        try {
            out.write(data);
        } finally {
            out.close();
        }