Question

I have some .xml files that are encoded in UTF-8. But whenever I try to parse them on my tablet (idea pad, lenovo, android 3.1), I get the same error:

org.xml.SAXParseException: Unexpected token (position: TEXT @1:2 in 
java.io.StringReader@40bdaef8).

These are the lines that throw the exception:

DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
InputSource inputSource = new InputSource();
inputSource.setCharacterStream(new StringReader(xmlData));
Document doc = db.parse(inputSource); // This line throws exception

Here is my input:

public String getFromFile(ASerializer aserializer) {
    String filename = aserializer.toLocalResource();
    String data = new String();
    try {
        InputStream stream = _context.getResources().getAssets().open(filename);
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(stream));
        StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder();
        String line = null;
        while((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
            str.append(line);
        }
            stream.close();
            data = str.toString();
   }

           catch(Exception e) {
       }
       return data;
    }

XML File:

<Results>
    <Result title="08/07/2011">
        <Field title="Company one" value="030589674"/>
        <Field title="Company two" value="081357852"/>
        <Field title="Company three" value="093587125"/>
        <Field title="Company four" value="095608977"/>
    </Result>
    <Result title="11/07/2011">
        <Field title="Company one" value="030589674"/>
        <Field title="Company two" value="081357852"/>
    </Result>
</Results>

I don’t want to convert them to ANSI, so is there any way to make the db.parse() work?

Answer 1

At this line:

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(stream));

You’re reading from stream using the platform default encoding. That’s almost certainly not what you want. You’d need to check the XML for for the actual encoding and the correct way to do that is somewhat complicated.

Luckily, every sane XML parser (including the Java/Android one) can do that on its own. To make the XML parser do that, simply pass in the stream itself instead of trying to read it manually.

InputSource inputSource = new InputSource(stream);