Question

I want to parse xml files that have elements like these:

<element>&amp</element>
<element>&amp;</element>

But SAX Parser is giving me the following exception during parsing:

org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The reference to entity "amp" must end with the ';' delimiter.
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.DOMParser.parse(DOMParser.java:249)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(DocumentBuilderImpl.java:284)
at javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(DocumentBuilder.java:208)

is there any known workaround for this?

The java code that throws the exception is this:

DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder().parse(file);

Answer 1

I’m unable to reproduce this with the XML you’ve shown (before your edit). Short but complete program:

import java.io.*;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        File file = new File("test.xml");
        DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance()
            .newDocumentBuilder()
                .parse(file);
    }
}

With a file of:

<element>&amp;</element>

… it runs with no error.

When the file is just:

<element>&amp</element>

… it shows the same exception you reported.

My conclusion is that it’s correct, and your file is broken. Look for every occurrence of &amp in the file, and find where it’s missing a semi-colon.