Re: XMLSAX parser handling for embedded ampersand -- RPG400-L

Peter,

That's one of the reasons XML works great as a concept, but not always such
in reality.

There are standards, but unless everyone follows them, it won't work. And
rarely do I see someone follow XML standards to a "T" (except for very
large companies that provide data to thousands of customers and it would be
bad not to).

If you're sending XML to someone and just whipped up a quick program to
send data to one person, you probably will overlook encoding special
characters.

The way I see it, if someone sends you bad XML you tell them to fix it or
you can't process it. I understand "the customer is always right" but, in
this case, they're not. And I wouldn't want to write catches for all the
possible errors that could happen with poorly formatted XML.

Easier said than done, I know. :)

Brad
www.bvstools.com

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 2:37 AM, Peter Connell <Peter.Connell@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Developers parsing xml should be aware of the pre-requisite to encode
entity references like ampersand.
What I'm asking is for an explanation of the rather counter-intuitive
handling of the event when the sax parser when encounters an ampersand..
It is not unreasonable to be sent a large xml file from a customer who may
not have sufficient checks on populating xml values.

---Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
thomas.raddatz@xxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, 13 May 2014 6:10 p.m.
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: XMLSAX parser handling for embedded ampersand

Peter,

It is not XML-SAX that fails parsing the xml document due to a bug, but
the creator of the document who made the mistake. The ampersand is a xml
special character that needs to be encoded as "&".

For example (taken from "ILE RPG Reference":

xmlDocument =
'<meeting>+
<attendee name="Jack" company="A&B Electronics"/>+
<attendee company="City+ Waterworks" name="Jill"/>+
<attendee name="Bill" company="Ace Movers" extra="yes"/>+
</meeting>';

Is parsed and printed as:

Attendee Jack is from company A&B Electronics
Attendee Jill is from company City+ Waterworks

Feel free to refer to w3schools for details:

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_syntax.asp

Regards,

Thomas.

rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx schrieb am 13.05.2014 01:32:39:

Von: Peter.Connell@xxxxxxxxxx
An: RPG400-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx,
Datum: 13.05.2014 01:33
Betreff: XMLSAX parser handling for embedded ampersand Gesendet von:
rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx

XMLSAX does not appear to allow you to handle data like "smith&brown"
( supplied by customer in a large file ) The parser raises a an
*XML_EXCEPTION event when the ampersand is

encountered.

Even if you code for *XML_EXCEPTION events to ignore them it appears
that once encountered all subsequent events are returned as

*XML_EXCEPTION.

Some IBM doco says an ampersand should generate *XML_UNKNOWN_REF but I
always get *XML_EXCEPTION Another IBM doco says a limitation of XMLSAX
is that it does not handle ampersand.

Anybody found this?

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