Possible Bug/Feature with SAXBuilder's setExpandEntities()

David Cheng-Ping Wang <[email protected]> Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:14:50 -0500
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.java.jdom.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hello,

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but I thought I would 
report it anyway... I have attached (also reproduced below) a simple 
example that illustrates the problem. I have tested this with Java 
1.6EE, and JDOM's Jan 9th, 2009 nightly build as well as the standard 
1.1 release.

In this example, I am trying to prevent the expansion of the entity 
"&minus;" in an XHTML document that is being read in and then 
immediately written out. I create an instance of SAXBuilder, 
setExpandEntities(false), then call the build() method on an input 
XHTML doc. For simplicity, I then use an instance of XMLOutputter to 
print the parsed document to standard out (Even though I don't think 
it's necessary for standard out, I also make sure the encoding is 
consistent between the Format and the OutputStream and that it is a 
common "US-ASCII" format).

The original XHTML document uses the entity:
&minus;

But, the resulting XHTML printed to standard out shows:
&minus;&#x2212;

Apparently, setting "setExpandEntities(false)" had the effect of 
duplicating the character. I would expect that setting expand 
entities to 'false' would simply leave the "&minus;", without 
duplicating it in US-ASCII formatting.

This isn't a big problem because if the default value, 'true', is 
used for entity expansion, the resulting output will simply contain 
"&#x2212;" instead of duplicating the character. Even though the 
original entity encoding has changed, the resulting output will still 
behave/appear the same as the original, which is probably what's 
normally required.

- Thanks for any feedback & Happy 2009,
- David W.

======= INPUT XHTML DOCUMENT START =======
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" 
href="http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/pmathml.xsl"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
   <head>
   </head>
   <body>
     <p>&minus;</p>
   </body>
</html>
======= INPUT XHTML DOCUMENT END =======


======= TEST JAVA CODE START =======
import java.io.File;
import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;

import org.jdom.Document;
import org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder;
import org.jdom.output.Format;
import org.jdom.output.XMLOutputter;

public class Test {
         public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
                 File fileInput = new File("testEntity.xml");
                 Document doc;

                 SAXBuilder b = new SAXBuilder();
                 b.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);
                 b.setExpandEntities(false);
                 doc = b.build(fileInput);
                 doc.getDocType().setInternalSubset(null);

                 XMLOutputter outputter = new XMLOutputter();
                 Format format = Format.getPrettyFormat();
                 format.setEncoding("US-ASCII");
                 outputter.setFormat(format);

                 outputter.output(doc, new 
OutputStreamWriter(System.out,format.getEncoding()));
         }
}
======= TEST JAVA CODE END =====

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jdomExpandEntitiesProblem.zip (application/zip, 1.2 KB) - not displayed