Question

I’m trying to access an XML file within a jar file, from a separate jar that’s running as a desktop application. I can get the URL to the file I need, but when I pass that to a FileReader (as a String) I get a FileNotFoundException saying ‘The file name, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.’

As a point of reference, I have no trouble reading image resources from the same jar, passing the URL to an ImageIcon constructor. This seems to indicate that the method I’m using to get the URL is correct.

URL url = getClass().getResource('/xxx/xxx/xxx/services.xml'); ServicesLoader jsl = new ServicesLoader( url.toString() ); 

Inside the ServicesLoader class I have

XMLReader xr = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader(); xr.setContentHandler( this ); xr.setErrorHandler( this ); xr.parse( new InputSource( new FileReader( filename ))); 

What’s wrong with using this technique to read the XML file?

Answer 1

The problem was that I was going a step too far in calling the parse method of XMLReader. The parse method accepts an InputSource, so there was no reason to even use a FileReader. Changing the last line of the code above to

xr.parse( new InputSource( filename )); 

works just fine.