Question

I am writing a screen scraping app that reads out various pages and extracts the data. I’m using the SAXParserFactory go get a SAXParser which in turn gets me an XMLReader. I have configured the Factory like this:

spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
spf.setValidating(false);
spf.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/validation", false);
spf.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/disallow-doctype-decl", true);
spf.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/use-entity-resolver2", false);

However, whenever I parse a document that contains the &nbsp entity I get an

SEVERE: null
    org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The
    entity "nbsp" was referenced, butnot declared.
            at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1231)
            at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(SAXParserImpl.java:522)

I can understand that it can’t find the entity, since I told the factory to not read the DTD, but how do I disable entity checking alltogther?

EDIT: This is for an Android app, which is why I am reluctant to use an API/library that isn’t in the standard environment.

Answer 1

SAX doesn’t seem capable of this, but the StAX API does. See this previous question/answer for how to set this up.

If you’re writing the XML processor by hand, the StAX API is a lot easier to deal with than the SAX API, so you win on both counts.