"character conversion error" while parsing xml files

Question

Hello,
I'm trying to parse MusicXML (Recordare) files, but I'm getting an exception.
I'm using the SAX parser (javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser).
Here is the code I use to instantiate it:
final javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory saxParserFactory = javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
final javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser saxParser = saxParserFactory.newSAXParser();
final org.xml.sax.XMLReader parser = saxParser.getXMLReader();
I'm using my own handler, but I get the same exception even if I use org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler.
The error I get is:
Character conversion error: "Illegal ASCII character, 0xc2" (line number may be too low).
The first few lines of my xml files look like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE score-partwise
PUBLIC "-//Recordare//DTD MusicXML 0.6 Partwise//EN"
"http://www.musicxml.org/dtds/partwise.dtd">
<score-partwise>
[...etc...]
If I delete the <!DOCTYPE ...> line, then I don't get the exception anymore. But the MusicXML files I get (from some other program) always contain this line, and it would be quite some work to delete them from every file manually.
So does anyone know if there is a way to avoid deleting that line in every file, while still being able to parse the xml files without exceptions?
Or maybe does anyone know what the exact cause of the exception is? (because I don't know what exactly causes it)
Thank you in advance.
Greetz,
Jipo

Answer 1

So does anyone know if there is a way to avoid
deleting that line in every file, while still being
able to parse the xml files without exceptions?ok this is side-stepping the real problem but I've used this code to filterout DTD references for other reasons   public static InputStream filterOutDTDRef(InputStream in) throws IOException {
      BufferedReader iniReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(in));
      StringBuffer newXML = new StringBuffer();
      for(String line = iniReader.readLine(); line!=null; line = iniReader.readLine())
         newXML.append(line+"\n");
      in.close();
      int s = newXML.indexOf("<!DOCTYPE ");
      if(s!=-1)
         newXML.replace(s,newXML.indexOf(">",s)+1,"");
      return new ByteArrayInputStream(newXML.toString().getBytes());
   }and it actually speeds up the parsing phase too (since the DTD ref.s were on the web and the XML standard mandates that there is a fetch for each xml file parsed..)
you can feed the above into the InputSource constructor that takes an InputStream argument.
Now for the real problem... 0xc2 is "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX" according to a unicode chart - which is not an ASCII character (as the error message correctly reports). I'm not sure why the file is being parsed as ASCII though? You could try parsing in a FileReader to the inputsource and hope it picks up the default character encoding of your system, and that that character encoding matches the file. Or you could try passing in a FileReader constructed with a explicit character encoding (eg "UTF8") and see if that does the trick?
asjf