Currently, I'm working on a feature that involves parsing XML that we receive from another product. I decided to run some tests against some actual customer data, and it looks like the other product is allowing input from users that should be considered invalid. Anyways, I still have to try and figure out a way to parse it. We're using javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder and I'm getting an error on input that looks like the following.
<xml>
...
<description>Example:Description:<THIS-IS-PART-OF-DESCRIPTION></description>
...
</xml>
As you can tell, the description has what appears to be an invalid tag inside of it (<THIS-IS-PART-OF-DESCRIPTION>). Now, this description tag is known to be a leaf tag and shouldn't have any nested tags inside of it. Regardless, this is still an issue and yields an exception on DocumentBuilder.parse(...)
I know this is invalid XML, but it's predictably invalid. Any ideas on a way to parse such input?
That "XML" is worse than invalid – it's not well-formed; see Well Formed vs Valid XML.
An informal assessment of the predictability of the transgressions does not help. That textual data is not XML. No conformant XML tools or libraries can help you process it.
Options, most desirable first:
Have the provider fix the problem on their end. Demand well-formed XML. (Technically the phrase well-formed XML is redundant but may be useful for emphasis.)
Use a tolerant markup parser to cleanup the problem ahead of parsing as XML:
Standalone: xmlstarlet has robust recovering and repair capabilities credit: RomanPerekhrest
xmlstarlet fo -o -R -H -D bad.xml 2>/dev/null
Standalone and C/C++: HTML Tidy works with XML too. Taggle is a port of TagSoup to C++.
Python: Beautiful Soup is Python-based. See notes in the Differences between parsers section. See also answers to this question for more
suggestions for dealing with not-well-formed markup in Python,
including especially lxml's recover=True option.
See also this answer for how to use codecs.EncodedFile() to cleanup illegal characters.
Java: TagSoup and JSoup focus on HTML. FilterInputStream can be used for preprocessing cleanup.
.NET:
XmlReaderSettings.CheckCharacters can
be disabled to get past illegal XML character problems.
#jdweng notes that XmlReaderSettings.ConformanceLevel can be set to
ConformanceLevel.Fragment so that XmlReader can read XML Well-Formed Parsed Entities lacking a root element.
#jdweng also reports that XmlReader.ReadToFollowing() can sometimes
be used to work-around XML syntactical issues, but note
rule-breaking warning in #3 below.
Microsoft.Language.Xml.XMLParser is said to be “error-tolerant”.
Go: Set Decoder.Strict to false as shown in this example by #chuckx.
PHP: See DOMDocument::$recover and libxml_use_internal_errors(true). See nice example here.
Ruby: Nokogiri supports “Gentle Well-Formedness”.
R: See htmlTreeParse() for fault-tolerant markup parsing in R.
Perl: See XML::Liberal, a "super liberal XML parser that parses broken XML."
Process the data as text manually using a text editor or
programmatically using character/string functions. Doing this
programmatically can range from tricky to impossible as
what appears to be
predictable often is not -- rule breaking is rarely bound by rules.
For invalid character errors, use regex to remove/replace invalid characters:
PHP: preg_replace('/[^\x{0009}\x{000a}\x{000d}\x{0020}-\x{D7FF}\x{E000}-\x{FFFD}]+/u', ' ', $s);
Ruby: string.tr("^\u{0009}\u{000a}\u{000d}\u{0020}-\u{D7FF}\u{E000}-\u{FFFD}", ' ')
JavaScript: inputStr.replace(/[^\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\xFF\x85\xA0-\uD7FF\uE000-\uFDCF\uFDE0-\uFFFD]/gm, '')
For ampersands, use regex to replace matches with &: credit: blhsin, demo
&(?!(?:#\d+|#x[0-9a-f]+|\w+);)
Note that the above regular expressions won't take comments or CDATA
sections into account.
A standard XML parser will NEVER accept invalid XML, by design.
Your only option is to pre-process the input to remove the "predictably invalid" content, or wrap it in CDATA, prior to parsing it.
The accepted answer is good advice, and contains very useful links.
I'd like to add that this, and many other cases of not-wellformed and/or DTD-invalid XML can be repaired using SGML, the ISO-standardized superset of HTML and XML. In your case, what works is to declare the bogus THIS-IS-PART-OF-DESCRIPTION element as SGML empty element and then use eg. the osx program (part of the OpenSP/OpenJade SGML package) to convert it to XML. For example, if you supply the following to osx
<!DOCTYPE xml [
<!ELEMENT xml - - ANY>
<!ELEMENT description - - ANY>
<!ELEMENT THIS-IS-PART-OF-DESCRIPTION - - EMPTY>
]>
<xml>
<description>blah blah
<THIS-IS-PART-OF-DESCRIPTION>
</description>
</xml>
it will output well-formed XML for further processing with the XML tools of your choice.
Note, however, that your example snippet has another problem in that element names starting with the letters xml or XML or Xml etc. are reserved in XML, and won't be accepted by conforming XML parsers.
IMO these cases should be solved by using JSoup.
Below is a not-really answer for this specific case, but found this on the web (thanks to inuyasha82 on Coderwall). This code bit did inspire me for another similar problem while dealing with malformed XMLs, so I share it here.
Please do not edit what is below, as it is as it on the original website.
The XML format, requires to be valid a unique root element declared in the document.
So for example a valid xml is:
<root>
<element>...</element>
<element>...</element>
</root>
But if you have a document like:
<element>...</element>
<element>...</element>
<element>...</element>
<element>...</element>
This will be considered a malformed XML, so many xml parsers just throw an Exception complaining about no root element. Etc.
In this example there is a solution on how to solve that problem and succesfully parse the malformed xml above.
Basically what we will do is to add programmatically a root element.
So first of all you have to open the resource that contains your "malformed" xml (i. e. a file):
File file = new File(pathtofile);
Then open a FileInputStream:
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(file);
If we try to parse this stream with any XML library at that point we will raise the malformed document Exception.
Now we create a list of InputStream objects with three lements:
A ByteIputStream element that contains the string: <root>
Our FileInputStream
A ByteInputStream with the string: </root>
So the code is:
List<InputStream> streams =
Arrays.asList(
new ByteArrayInputStream("<root>".getBytes()),
fis,
new ByteArrayInputStream("</root>".getBytes()));
Now using a SequenceInputStream, we create a container for the List created above:
InputStream cntr =
new SequenceInputStream(Collections.enumeration(str));
Now we can use any XML Parser library, on the cntr, and it will be parsed without any problem. (Checked with Stax library);
I am a newbie but keen into test automation. Please don't hesitate to send and reply ANY hints you have.
So the problem is that I've faced a web page where there is input field but there is no ID for it in source. Input field has type=text AND that input field is THE ONLY on that page. I have not been able to locate that element with Robot Framework (+PyCharm) but I have a feeling that it should be possible some way in Xpath? Please help me.
Using Input Text xpath=//INPUT[#type='text'] test -> gives this error:
"InvalidElementStateException: Message: invalid element state:
Element is not currently interactable and may not be manipulated"
I am afraid that the ancient framework used in system under test is the problem. It's called GWT-ext and in many cases there exists id for element but it's generated randomly every time so that cannot be used as locator of the element. That's why I need to use other ways, like field names, types etc.
I am creating a web application using Thymeleaf with Spring. For that, I am following following document:
http://www.thymeleaf.org/doc/articles/thvsjsp.html
In this document, following code is being discussed:
https://github.com/thymeleaf/thymeleafexamples-thvsjsp
I am trying to get internationalization with Hindi (Indian language), for that I forked the repo given above and added one property file related to hi_IN (hindi-India), please see below code base on github:
https://github.com/prashantbhardwaj/thymeleafexamples-thvsjsp/tree/locale_change
When I tried, instead of getting hindi in browser, I got questions marks. I tried changing encoding of this property file from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8, but no benefit. Values, I am expecting for given properties are as follows:
subscription.email=ईमेल
subscription.type=प्रकार
subscription.submit=प्रेषित करें!
subscriptionType.ALL_EMAILS=सभी ईमेल
subscriptionType.DAILY_DIGEST=प्रतिदिन का पत्र
In Messages_hi_IN.properties file, I changed all the values from hindi (which was not hindi but escaped version of hindi) to english so you can copy and paste values which are provided by me.
Could you please help get me desired results? Locale for Hindi is hi_IN.
I need to send a Highcharts options object to an asp page so it can be written to a json flat file. These files are later passed to phantomjs via highcharts-convert in order to create some pdfs.
The problem however is stringifying the objects. I keep getting this error:
Uncaught TypeError: Converting circular structure to JSON
when I try this:
$.post("myASP.asp", JSON.stringify(myChart.highcharts().options));
There is a sample POST string here http://docs.highcharts.com/#render-charts-on-the-server but I'm not sure how to achieve that with mine. When I paste their sample into my code for testing I get all kinds of unescaped double quote errors. Is that a typo on their part?
I would check if there are curricular references in the JSON objects. As far as I remember that is not supported by the JSON serializer.
One example of this if you have an object with an array of children that refer back to the parent.
I think you can try the following:
{"infile":myChart.getSVG()}
This should get the svg representation of the chart
Has anyone used jQuery to populate an autocomplete list on a textbox using ASP.NET webforms? If so, can anyone recommend a good method? From my reading so far, it seems like most people are using delimited lists rather than JSON to bring the items back. I'm open to any ideas that will get me up and running rather quickly.
I made a tutorial to do this with asp.net mvc but it should be almost identical for traditional webforms:
http://blogs.msdn.com/joecar/archive/2009/01/08/autocomplete-with-asp-net-mvc-and-jquery.aspx
There are many, many examples on the web. I've used this one before, and if I recall you only need to create an aspx that will return matching terms as a <BR/> separated list:
http://www.dyve.net/jquery/?autocomplete
The documentation shows php in the example, but there's no difference in the way the plugin itself works and I didn't have to do anything special as a result.
From the documentation:
> $("#input_box").autocomplete("my_autocomplete_backend.php");
In the above example, Autocomplete
expects an input element with the id
"input_box" to exist. When a user
starts typing in the input box, the
autocompleter will request
my_autocomplete_backend.php with a GET
parameter named q that contains the
current value of the input box. Let's
assume that the user has typed
"foo"(without quotes). Autocomplete
will then request
my_autocomplete_backend.php?q=foo.
The backend should output possible
values for the autocompleter, each on
a single line. Output cannot contain
the pipe symbol "|", since that is
considered a separator (more on that
later).
An appropiate simple output would be:
foo
fool
foot
footloose
foo fighters
food fight
I wrote an Asp.Net WebControl and some Asp.Net MVC extension methods wrapping the JQuery UI autocomplete widget.
I wrote documentation as well about how to implement a working resource providing a JSon result.
You can find it at:
http://autocompletedotnet.codeplex.com/
Hope it can help