SAXParseException that only occurs locally. Works on WebServers

Question

I am writing a junit test that is testing and older piece of code. This code works on our iplanet webservers and our local Tomcat servers and runs with no problems. However when run by the JUNIT test I get this exception.

Background: It pulls an XSL file from a JAR then transforms it with an xml document that is read in from a resource file.

I have tried changing transformer factories, changing encoding, and checked all files for null characters using a hex editor. Any ideas?

[Fatal Error] :2251:46: An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x0) was found in the value of attribute "test" and element is "xsl:when". SystemId Unknown; Line #2251; Column #46; org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 2251; columnNumber: 46; An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x0) was found in the value of attribute "test" and element is "xsl:when".

**UPDATE I have found that if I use the project's class folder where the XSL is held and move it about the jar's dependency it works, but if it uses the xsl out of the jar it breaks

Answer 1

This was caused because the XSL files I was trying to transform were still in a JAR. I had to have Maven extract the files into the target directory first.

Answer 2

SUGGESTIONS:

1) Make sure your library versions all match.

2) I suspect that " An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x0) was found" might be caused by any of several completely different things. You should investigate each of them.

3) First, most obvious - check your input for a null character :)

4) Second, check your encoding - perhaps your sender is writing UTF-16, but your reader is expecting UTF-8. Here's a good link:

* Error about invalid XML characters on Java

This is an encoding issue. Either you read it the inputstream as UTF8 and it isn't or the other way around.

You should specify the encoding explicitly when you read the content. E.g. via

new InputStreamReader(getInputStream(), "UTF-8")

Another problem could be the tomcat. Try to add URIEncoding="UTF-8" in your tomcat’s connector settings in the server.xml file

5) The root cause might also be a failed read or a missing object of some kind. A missing definition, perhaps.

Q: What is "SystemId"? What might cause it to "go missing"?

6) One possibility is that "resolveEntity()" is failing:

InputSource resolveEntity(String publicId, String systemId)

Here are a couple of links regarding that problem:

• Java SAX Parser raises UnknownHostException

• how to disable dtd at runtime in java's xpath?

7) Both of these links suggest "resolveEntity() might be failing because you can't connect to a specified host. Check the network host names listed in your XML, and make sure you can "ping" them.

Answer 3

If it's got as far as line 2251 that suggests strongly that there's something wrong with the file contents around that location. If there's nothing wrong with the file at that location, my next suggestion would be that something's wrong with the parser. I know it sounds crazy, but the XML parser built in to the JDK is seriously buggy, and I would check whether the problem goes away if you install the Apache version of Xerces in its place. In many cases this is simply a question of putting the relevant JAR files in the lib/endorsed directory of the JDK installation.