Can I force JAXB not to convert " into ", for example, when marshalling to XML?

Elliot picture Elliot · Oct 1, 2009 · Viewed 60.8k times · Source

I have an Object that is being marshalled to XML using JAXB. One element contains a String that includes quotes ("). The resulting XML has " where the " existed.

Even though this is normally preferred, I need my output to match a legacy system. How do I force JAXB to NOT convert the HTML entities?

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Thank you for the replies. However, I never see the handler escape() called. Can you take a look and see what I'm doing wrong? Thanks!

package org.dc.model;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Writer;

import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext;
import javax.xml.bind.JAXBException;
import javax.xml.bind.Marshaller;

import org.dc.generated.Shiporder;

import com.sun.xml.internal.bind.marshaller.CharacterEscapeHandler;

public class PleaseWork {
    public void prettyPlease() throws JAXBException {
        Shiporder shipOrder = new Shiporder();
        shipOrder.setOrderid("Order's ID");
        shipOrder.setOrderperson("The woman said, \"How ya doin & stuff?\"");

        JAXBContext context = JAXBContext.newInstance("org.dc.generated");
        Marshaller marshaller = context.createMarshaller();
        marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, Boolean.TRUE);
        marshaller.setProperty(CharacterEscapeHandler.class.getName(),
                new CharacterEscapeHandler() {
                    @Override
                    public void escape(char[] ch, int start, int length,
                            boolean isAttVal, Writer out) throws IOException {
                        out.write("Called escape for characters = " + ch.toString());
                    }
                });
        marshaller.marshal(shipOrder, System.out);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        new PleaseWork().prettyPlease();
    }
}

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The output is this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<shiporder orderid="Order's ID">
    <orderperson>The woman said, &quot;How ya doin &amp; stuff?&quot;</orderperson>
</shiporder>

and as you can see, the callback is never displayed. (Once I get the callback being called, I'll worry about having it actually do what I want.)

--

Answer

Elliot picture Elliot · Oct 5, 2009

Solution my teammate found:

PrintWriter printWriter = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(xmlFile));
DataWriter dataWriter = new DataWriter(printWriter, "UTF-8", DumbEscapeHandler.theInstance);
marshaller.marshal(request, dataWriter);

Instead of passing the xmlFile to marshal(), pass the DataWriter which knows both the encoding and an appropriate escape handler, if any.

Note: Since DataWriter and DumbEscapeHandler are both within the com.sun.xml.internal.bind.marshaller package, you must bootstrap javac.