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I am writing a little screen-scraping app that consumes some XHTML - it goes without saying that the XHTML is invalid: ampersands aren't escaped as &.

I am using Android's XmlPullParser and it spews out the following error upon the incorrectly encoded value:

org.xmlpull.v1.XmlPullParserException: unterminated entity ref 
(position:START_TAG <a href='/Fahrinfo/bin/query.bin/dox?ld=0.1&n=3&i=9c.0323581.1266265347&rt=0&vcra'>
@55:134 in java.io.InputStreamReader@43b1ef70)

How do I get around this? I have thought about the following solutions:

  1. Wrapping the InputStream in another one that replaces the ampersands with entity refs
  2. Configuring the Parser so it magically accepts the incorrect markup

Which ones is likely to be more successful?

Leonard Ehrenfried
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    Thank you for posting this question. I was experiencing an "unterminated entity ref" on some XML I was trying to parse with the XmlPullParser, but I wasn't sure what was causing it. But now that you mention un-escaped ampersands (causing invalid XML that firefox won't display except in source mode) as a possible cause, I'm pretty sure that's what my problem is, which will make it a lot easier to fix! – Jessica Brown Mar 17 '10 at 20:59

2 Answers2

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I was stuck on this for about an hour before figuring out that in my case it was the "&" that couldn't be resolved by the XML PULL PARSER, so i found the solution. So Here is a snippet of code which totally fix it.

void ParsingActivity(String r) {
    try {
        parserCreator = XmlPullParserFactory.newInstance();
        parser = parserCreator.newPullParser();
        // Here we give our file object in the form of a stream to the
        // parser.
        parser.setInput(new StringReader(r.replaceAll("&", "&amp;")));
        // as a SAX parser this will raise events/callback as and when it
        // comes to a element.
        int parserEvent = parser.getEventType();
        // we go thru a loop of all elements in the xml till we have
        // reached END of document.
        while (parserEvent != XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT) {
            switch (parserEvent) {
            // if u have reached start of a tag
            case XmlPullParser.START_TAG:
                // get the name of the tag
                String tag = parser.getName();

pretty much what I'm doing I'm just replacing the & with &amp; since I was dealing with parsing a URL. Hope this helps.

John Carter
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MR Mido
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2

I would go with your first option, replacing the ampersands seems more of a fit solution than the other. The second option seems more of a hack to get it to work by accepting incorrect markup.

Anthony Forloney
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