Catching exceptions with Xalan xslt

Question

I have the folowwing XSLT based on Xalan:

TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
XalanErrorListener listener = new XalanErrorListener();
factory.setErrorListener(listener);

// Create transformer
StreamSource config = new StreamSource(xslPath);
Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer(config);

// Create input / ouput
StreamSource source = new StreamSource(inputPath);
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(outputPath);

// Transform
transformer.transform(source, result);

My XalanErrorListener simply overrides error, fatalError and warning methods from the javax.xml.transform.ErrorListener class and logs the exception:

public final class XalanErrorListener implements ErrorListener {

static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(XalanErrorListener.class);

@Override
public void error(TransformerException exception) throws TransformerException {
    LOGGER.error(exception);
}

@Override
public void fatalError(TransformerException exception) throws TransformerException {
    LOGGER.error(exception);
}

@Override
public void warning(TransformerException exception) throws TransformerException {
    LOGGER.warn(exception);
}
}

Yet, when executing on a badly encoded file, I get the following message in the console:

(Location of error unknown)
  com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.io.MalformedByteSequenceException: 
    Invalid byte 2 of 2-byte UTF-8 sequence.

The program executes normally: no exception is thrown or logged and the generated file is empty!

How can I catch the exception to handle it the way I want?

Answer 1

The problem came from the fact that the ErrorListener needed to be set to the Transformer and not the TransformerFactory:

Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer(config);
transformer.setErrorListener(listener);

Answer 2

The ErrorListener you supply to Xalan catches transformation errors, but it does not catch XML parsing errors. For that you need to supply an ErrorHandler to the Xerces parser.