Question

I have found twofold treatment of XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT tag in Android’s built-in SAX parser. Code is simple:

    String s; //actually contains XML
    //blah-blah
    factory = XmlPullParserFactory.newInstance();
    factory.setNamespaceAware(false);
    xpp = factory.newPullParser();
    StringReader sw=new StringReader(s);
    xpp.setInput(sw);
    int eventType = xpp.getEventType();
    while (eventType != XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT)
    {
        if (eventType == XmlPullParser.START_TAG)
        {
               //blah-blah
        }
        else if(eventType==XmlPullParser.TEXT)
        {
               //blah-blah
        }
        else if (eventType == XmlPullParser.END_TAG)
        {
               //blah-blah
        }
        eventType=xpp.next();
    }

If XML document basically looks like (String s):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<templates>
    <template key="Person" name="Person">
        <field key="Photo" name="Photo" type="image" hint="Press to select image"/>
    </template>
</templates>

With this everything works fine. But if there are some extra characters after final tag </templates> – here goes weird side (nature of my XML is such that sometimes there can appear some litter symbols after final tag).

For nearly all Android devices (about 90%) SAX parser ignores extra characters, but in some of devices – mostly devices with ICS – SAX parser tries to parse extra characters and crashes.

So the question is: what says XML standard? Should SAX parser try to parse extra symbols after final tag? And what anyway is XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT – it’s either end of data or just final tag?

Answer 1

If there are non-whitespace characters after the end tag of the root element, the file is not well-formed XML and the parser is required to report this fact to the application.