Question

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JAVA SAX parser split calls to characters()

I have an XML file with the following syntax:

<tag ...>
a bunch of text here
<tag ...>

There aren’t any closing tags for tag. I’m grabbing the text in-between the two tags, and storing them in a List<String> in characters (). It works for the most part, but on some xml files, it reads a line terminator or something, that breaks the text into two; rather than storing a single entry, “a bunch of text here”, I get two entries: “a bunch of”, and “text here”. The difference is that unlike all the other entries, it doesn’t store a line break after “a bunch of”, or before “text here”.

I need to fix this, but don’t know how. I’d appreciate your help.

Answer 1

The parser is allowed to call the ContentHandler characters method multiple times for each string of element text, it’s not finding a line terminator necessarily. the Java tutorial on SAX has a short explanation of the characters method:

Parsers are not required to return any particular number of characters at one time. A parser can return anything from a single character at a time up to several thousand and still be a standard-conforming implementation. So if your application needs to process the characters it sees, it is wise to have the characters() method accumulate the characters in a java.lang.StringBuffer and operate on them only when you are sure that all of them have been found.

Also this Javaworld article has good explanations and examples.