Error in characters method of Paser

Question

I have written an XML parser using the org.xml and javax.xml libraries. My parser class extends the org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler class.
In my characters(char[] ch, int start, int length) method I am trying to build up a string containing the characters from start to length - 1 of the array ch.
This is the code:
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer(length);
String content = "";
for(int i=start; i<start+length; i++)
{  buffer.append(ch[i]);
content = buffer.toString().trim();
This works most of the time but sometimes an error occurs and the length figure is wrong.
Say if I had an XML file with the following section:
<method>
<name>SessionKey()</name>
</method>
Instead of the buffer getting 1 string - namely "SessionKey()"; I am receiving 2 strings - "Sessio" and "nKey()".
When I do a check and get the program to print out the value of length it is giving me 2 cases of the length being 6 instead of one case when it is 12..
Can anybody see where my problem might be?
Thanks in advance for the help!
Wallace

Answer 1

Well, you are certainly building the StringBuffer the hard way. Why not justbuffer.append(ch, start, length);? But your real problem is not taking into account the possibility that the parser may break a text node into more than one piece and call the characters() method for each of those pieces. Create your StringBuffer in the startElement() method, append to it in the characters() method, and clean it up the endElement() method.