Question

I download an XML-file, I generate using PHP, that looks similar to this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
<customersXML> 
   ...
   <customer id="12" name="Me+%26+My+Brother" swid="1" /> 
   ...
</customersXML> 

Now I need to parse it in Java, but before that I use URL-Decode, so the XML become this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
<customersXML> 
   ...
   <customer id="12" name="Me & My Brother" swid="1" /> 
   ...
</customersXML> 

But when I parse the XML-file using SAX, I get a problem with “&”. How can I get around this?

Answer 1

The ampersand is a special character in xml (O’reilly Xml: Entities: Handling Special Content) and needs to be encoded. Replace it with & before sending it.