Encoding Type XML Document

Question

Hi,
I have an XML document which is essentially data pulled from the craigs list website. It contains alot of Ampersands and pound signs and other stuff which i have been told does not follow the UTF-8 encoding which i put in the tag at the top of the document. Could someone tell me what the correct encoding would be so that i can parse the file using the Java DOM parser without it throwing out errors such as;
Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence.
Thanks Alot
Richard.

Answer 1

Sounds like you don't know too much about XML and encoding. Try reading this tutorial, it's long but it's thorough:
[http://skew.org/xml/tutorial/|http://skew.org/xml/tutorial/]
That should take care of the XML part. Now you need to know the Java part: the simple rule is to not create XML documents if you don't know what encoding they will have. Your best bet is to write them using UTF-8 in the first place. I don't know how you're writing the documents but my bet is you're using plain old Java I/O. In that case use an OutputStreamWriter which specifies UTF-8 for the encoding. Here's a link to the Java I/O tutorial if you don't know how to do that:
[http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/io/|http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/io/]