The markup must be well-formed

Question

First off, let me say I am a new to SAX and Java.

I am trying to read information from an XML file that is not well formed.

When I try to use the SAX or DOM Parser I get the following error in response:

The markup in the document following the root element must be well-formed.

This is how I set up my XML file:

<format type="filename" t="13241">0;W650;004;AG-Erzgeb</format>
<format type="driver" t="123412">001;023</format>
   ...

Can I force the SAX or DOM to parse XML files even if they are not well formed XML?

Thank you for your help. Much appreciated. Haythem

Wayfarer

FYI: By definition... If it's not well formed it's not XML. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Well-formedness_and_error-handling – Ashjian

Answer 1

Your best bet is to make the XML well-formed, probably by pre-processing it a bit. In this case, you can achieve that simply by putting an XML declaration on (and even that's optional) and providing a root element (which is not optional), like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<wrapper>
    <format type="filename" t="13241">0;W650;004;AG-Erzgeb</format>
    <format type="driver" t="123412">001;023</format>
</wrapper>

There I've arbitrarily picked the name "wrapper" for the root element; it can be whatever you like.

Enterostomy

I'd just like to add that you don't necessarily need to do that modification on the disk, but that you could do it on the fly by providing a filtering InputStream/Reader. Especially for big files (or reading XML from a URL) this can be very useful. A SequenceInputStream could be useful here: java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/SequenceInputStream.html – Delanos

Good posibility. is not easier to trun out the parse?. can I turn out the parse() mehtode and overwrite it to ignore the non-well-formed status? – Wayfarer

Haythem: probably not, because the parser is deep within the library and the behavior of such a browser would be undefined (the XML libraries don't know how to handle XML with more than one root element). Doing it this way instantly makes your XML well-formed and all XML-aware tools can suddenly handle it just fine (provided you have no other incorrect parts in there). – Delanos

Answer 2

Hint: using sax or stax you can successfully parse a not well formed xml document until the FIRST "well formed-ness" error is encountered.

(I know that this is not of too much help...)

Crockett

Answer 3

As the DOM will scan you xml file then build a tree, the root node of the tree is like the as 1 Answer. However, if the Parser can't find the or even , it can even build the tree. So, its better to do some pre-processing the xml file before parser it by DOM or Sax.

Windpollinated