Question

I’ve created my own DefaultHandler to parse rss feeds and for most feeds it’s working fine, however, for ESPN, it is cutting off part of the article url due to the way ESPN formats it’s urls. An example of a full article url from ESPN..

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=5189101&campaign=rss&source=ESPNHeadlines

The problem is for some reason the DefaultHandler characters method is only getting this from the tag that contains the above url.

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=5189101

As you can see, it’s cutting everything off the url from the ampersand escape code and after. How can I get the SAX parser to not cut my string off at this escape code? For ref. here is my characters method..

 public void characters(char ch[], int start, int length) {

  String chars = (new String(ch).substring(start, start + length));

  try {
   // If not in item, then title/link refers to feed
   if (!inItem) {
    if (inTitle)
     currentFeed.title = chars;
   } else {
    if (inLink)
     currentArticle.url = new URL(chars);
    if (inTitle)
     currentArticle.title = chars;
    if (inDescription)
     currentArticle.description = chars;
    if (inPubDate)
     currentArticle.pubDate = chars;
    if (inEnclosure) {
    }
   }
  } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
   Log.e("RSSReader", e.toString());
  }
 }

Rob W.

Answer 1

As you can see, it’s cutting
everything off the url from the
ampersand escape code and after.

From the documentation of the characters() method:

The Parser will call this method to
report each chunk of character data.
SAX parsers may return all contiguous
character data in a single chunk, or
they may split it into several chunks;
however, all of the characters in any
single event must come from the same
external entity so that the Locator
provides useful information.

When I write SAX parsers, I use a StringBuilder to append everything passed to characters():

public void characters (char ch[], int start, int length) {
    if (buf!=null) {
        for (int i=start; i<start+length; i++) {
            buf.append(ch[i]);
        }
    }
}

Then in endElement(), I take the contents of the StringBuilder and do something with it. That way, if the parser calls characters() several times, I don’t miss anything.