Question

I want to parse an XML whose tag contains an & for example: <xml><OC&C>12.4</OC&C></xml>. I tried to escape & to & but that didn’t fix the issue for tag name (it fixes it for values only), currently my code is throwing an exception, see complete function below.

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
{
  String xmlString        = "<xml><OC&C>12.4</OC&C></xml>";
  xmlString = xmlString.replaceAll("&", "&amp;");
  String path             = "xml";
  InputSource inputSource = new InputSource(new StringReader(xmlString));
  try
  {
    Document xmlDocument            = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder().parse(inputSource);
    XPath xPath                     = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
    XPathExpression xPathExpression = xPath.compile(path);

    System.out.println("Compiled Successfully.");
  }
  catch (SAXException e)
  {
    System.out.println("Error while retrieving node Path:" + path + " from " + xmlString + ". Returning null");
  }
}

Answer 1

xml could not be name of any XML element. So, your XML fragment could never be parsed anyway. Then you could try something like that.

<name><![CDATA[<OC&C>12.4</OC&C>]]></name>