XStream and underscores

Question

It looks like XStream (com.thoughtworks.xstream -> xstream 1.4.2) is handling underscores in element and attribute names in a very strange way. I need to fetch and parse an xml from a customer that are having underscores in their attributes. This is my first try with XStream and I'm a bit disappointed as I was hoping to avoid all the ugly xml parsing.

Here I provide a small test sample to hi light the behaviour. The last example shows my problem.

public class MyTest {
  public void testIt() {
    C1 a = new C1();
    a.a_b= "a_b";

    XStream xstream = new XStream();
    xstream.processAnnotations(C1.class);

    String xml = xstream.toXML(a);
    Logger.info(xml);

    C1 b = (C1) xstream.fromXML(xml);
    Logger.info(b.a_b);

    C1 c = (C1) xstream.fromXML("<C1 a_b=\"a_b\"/>");
    Logger.info(c.a_b);
  }
}

@XStreamAlias("C1")
class C1 {
@XStreamAsAttribute
String a_b;
}

This outputs

INFO: <C1 a__b="a_b"/>
INFO: a_b
INFO: null

Now my question - is there a way to make XStream understand a single underscore?

Answer 1

This worked for me:

XStream xs = new XStream(new DomDriver("UTF-8", new XmlFriendlyNameCoder("_-", "_")));