Question

I have a string that has 823237 characters in it. its actually an xml file and for testing purpose I want to return as a response form a servlet.

I have tried everything I can possible think of

1) creating a constant with the whole string… in this case Eclipse complains (with a red line under servlet class name) –

 The type generates a string that requires more than 65535 bytes to encode in Utf8 format in the constant pool

2) breaking the whole string into 20 string constants and writing to the out object directly
something like :

out.println( CONSTANT_STRING_PART_1 + CONSTANT_STRING_PART_2 + 
             CONSTANT_STRING_PART_3 + CONSTANT_STRING_PART_4 +
             CONSTANT_STRING_PART_5 + CONSTANT_STRING_PART_6 + 
     // add all the string constants till .... CONSTANT_STRING_PART_20); 

in this case … the build fails .. complaining..

   [javac] D:\xx\xxx\xxx.java:87: constant string too long
   [javac]      CONSTANT_STRING_PART_19 + CONSTANT_STRING_PART_20); 
                                                    ^

3) reading the xml file as a string and writing to out object .. in this case I get

SEVERE: Allocate exception for servlet MyServlet
Caused by: org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException: error: Content is not allowed in prolog.

Finally my question is … how can I return such a big string (as response) from the servlet ???

Answer 1

The second approach might work the following way:

out.print(CONSTANT_STRING_PART_1);
out.print(CONSTANT_STRING_PART_2);
out.print(CONSTANT_STRING_PART_3);
out.print(CONSTANT_STRING_PART_4);
// ...
out.print(CONSTANT_STRING_PART_N);
out.println();

You can do this in a loop of course (which is highly recommended ;)).

The way you do it, you just temporarely create the large string again to then pass it to println(), which is the same problem as the first one.