Question

do you know function in java that will validate a string to be a good XML element name.

Form w3schools:

XML elements must follow these naming
rules:

1. Names can contain letters, numbers, and other characters
2. Names cannot start with a number or punctuation character
3. Names cannot start with the letters xml (or XML, or Xml, etc)
4. Names cannot contain spaces

I found other questions that offered regex solutions, isn’t there a function that already does that?

Answer 1

If you are using Xerces XML parser, you can use the XMLChar (or XML11Char) class isValidName() method, like this:

org.apache.xerces.util.XMLChar.isValidName(String name)

There is also sample code available here for isValidName.