How to insert ascii characters using dom

Question

I am having a tough time inserting ascii values in to xml text content
i search for a regular space and try insert a non breaking space in my xml whic is basically �
Infact I want to insert the ascii value of a non breaking space or for that matter ascii value of any character, I am using dom level 2.
in the code the actual replace ment string is the ascii code, somehow when I click preview, it actually shows the space instead showing the what I have in my actual code, so i had to separate in the ascii and ; in my code snippet that follows
String text = nl.item(i).getNodeValue();
            System.out.println(text);
            String newText  = text.replaceAll("\\s", "� followed by a ;");
            nl.item(i).setNodeValue(newText)it actually inserts   in the xml code for the xml document and literally "&#160 followed by ;" appears in my document when viewed from a browser, all I am trying to do is replace a given character with an ascii value using dom. All i tried to do was replace a regular space with a non breaking space.
&nbsp won't work either, infact i tried ascii values for other characters too, i end up having the ascii value in the tag when i view the finished document in a browser.
Please help
Edited by: jaks4u on Mar 22, 2008 2:23 PM

Answer 1

As jtahlborn says, NBSP isn't an ASCII character. But this is Java we're working with, and XML. Neither of those two things have ever restricted themselves to the ASCII character set, and neither should you. They use Unicode, which is far larger and which does include that character. You could go to [the Unicode site|http://www.unicode.org/] and do some research -- which might broaden your horizons a lot -- but the code point for that character is (not surprisingly) 160. That's A0 in hexadecimal, so the Java character representing it ischar nbsp = '\u00a0';So use that in your code. Just make sure to output the XML document in an encoding that supports it (unlike ASCII). UTF-8 would be an excellent choice.