Txt to xml. Problems with characters(&, , ',...)

Question

I want to generate a xml file with text from a txt file but i have problems with special characters such as &, <... I'd like to know if there�s any class or library to filter the text in order to generate my xml without problems.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Use JDOM to generate your XML. It will worry about escaping issues for you.
Here's a (probably rather inelegant) example for you to play around with:
import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import javax.xml.transform.*;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
public class DateBoom {
     public static void main(String[] args)
          throws Exception
          DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
          DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
          String dodgyText = "< & '";
          Document document = builder.newDocument();
          Element root = document.createElement("root");
          root.setAttribute("dodgy",dodgyText);
          document.appendChild(root);
          Element child = document.createElement("child");
          root.appendChild(child);
          child.appendChild(document.createTextNode(dodgyText));
          Transformer transform = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();          
          Source source = new DOMSource(document);
          Result result = new StreamResult(System.out);
          transform.transform(source,result);
}Your alternative is to use something like String regular expressions (regex) to do this manually, but the XML oriented libraries will catch more corner cases than you're likely to anticipate, making them more reliable.