Invalid character ':' in value part of property on Tomcat 7.0.50 startup

Question

We have started getting a weird exception upon tomcat deployment, which prevents the server from starting. The setup was running for months without issues.

• Maven Project
• Eclipse Kepler 4.3.0
• Tomcat 7.0.50 (as Eclipse plugin)

Has anyone had this exception? Any idea on where to look for the problem?

javax.management.MalformedObjectNameException: Invalid character ':' in value part of property
    at javax.management.ObjectName.construct(ObjectName.java:618)
    at javax.management.ObjectName.<init>(ObjectName.java:1382)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleMBeanBase.register(LifecycleMBeanBase.java:156)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleMBeanBase.initInternal(LifecycleMBeanBase.java:61)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.initInternal(ContainerBase.java:1084)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.initInternal(StandardContext.java:6462)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.init(LifecycleBase.java:102)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:139)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1559)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1549)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:334)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:166)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1110)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:603)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:722)

Answer 1

You should clean tomccat's directory, probably some dependencies floating aroung,please check this answer

Answer 2

Okay that worked, I had to:

• Run "Add and Remove...", "Clean..." on The server
• Maven > Update Project (with clean enabled) on the project.

Answer 3

It seems a properties file has that character as part of a value. You must escape it. Note that althougt the usual syntax is key=value, key:value is also valid