Question

I am using a third party application and would like to change one of its files. The file is stored in XML but with an invalid doctype.

When I try to read use a it errors out becuase the doctype contains ‘file:///ReportWiz.dtd’ (as shown, with quotes) and I get an exception for cannot find file. Is there a way to tell the docbuilder to ignore this? I have tried setValidate to false and setNamespaceAware to false for the DocumentBuilderFactory.

The only solutions I can think of are

• copy file line by line into a new file, omitting the offending line, doing what i need to do, then copying into another new file and inserting the offending line back in, or
• doing mostly the same above but working with a FileStream of some sort (though I am not clear on how I could do this..help?)

DocumentBuilderFactory docFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory                     .newInstance(); docFactory.setValidating(false); DocumentBuilder docBuilder = docFactory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document doc = docBuilder.parse(file);

Answer 1

Tell your DocumentBuilderFactory to ignore the DTD declaration like this:

docFactory.setFeature('http://apache.org/xml/features/nonvalidating/load-external-dtd', false); 

See here for a list of available features.

You also might find JDOM a lot easier to work with than org.w3c.dom:

org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder(); builder.setFeature('http://apache.org/xml/features/nonvalidating/load-external-dtd', false); org.jdom.Document doc = builder.build(file);