{"id":703,"date":"2005-08-12T15:20:27","date_gmt":"2005-08-12T19:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.cephas.net\/?p=703"},"modified":"2005-08-12T15:20:27","modified_gmt":"2005-08-12T19:20:27","slug":"xml-characters-smart-quotes-and-apache-xml-rpc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/2005\/08\/12\/xml-characters-smart-quotes-and-apache-xml-rpc\/","title":{"rendered":"XML characters, smart quotes and Apache XML-RPC"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been eating my own dogfood<\/a> with the deliciousposter project<\/a> (as you can see from my daily links<\/a>). A couple days ago I posted a some links to del.icio.us and expected them to show up automatically the next day… except they didn’t. I traced it down to an errant smart quote that I copied from the Internet Alchemy Talis, Web 2.0 and All That<\/a> post, which caused the Apache XML-RPC library to throw this error:
\n
\njava.io.IOException: Invalid character data corresponding to XML entity ’
\n<\/code>
\nI worked under the assumption that the smart quote was an invalid XML character<\/a> for quite awhile, but it looks like it actually is according to the XML 1.1 specification<\/a>, the following characters<\/a> are allowed in an XML document:
\n
\n#x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF]
\n<\/code>
\nI then checked the source code for the XmlWriter<\/a> which has this method for writing character data:
\n
\n...
\nif (c < 0x20 || c > 0xff) {
\n  \/\/ Though the XML-RPC spec allows any ASCII
\n  \/\/ characters except '<' and '&', the XML spec
\n  \/\/ does not allow this range of characters,
\n  \/\/ resulting in a parse error from most XML
\n  \/\/ parsers.
\n  throw new XmlRpcClientException(\"Invalid character data \" +
\n  \"corresponding to XML entity &#\" +
\n  String.valueOf((int) c) + ';', null);
\n} else ..
\n<\/code>
\nwhich turns out to be a tad aggressive. It also turns out that the above code snippet and the version of the Apache XML-RPC library I was using are out of date. The chardata(String text)<\/code> has been updated in the latest version of the Apache XMl-RPC library to include a new method called isValidXMLChar(char c)<\/code> which is much more lenient:
\n
\nif (c == '\\n') return true;
\nif (c == '\\r') return true;
\nif (c == '\\t') return true;
\nif (c
\nand not coincidentally, is compliant with the specification.<\/p>\n

I'll be updating deliciousposter to use the latest version of the Apache XML-RPC library soon. In the meantime, if you're using the Apache XML-RPC library, you should probably download the latest version to take advantage of the new XML character validation method.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been eating my own dogfood with the deliciousposter project (as you can see from my daily links). A couple days ago I posted a some links to del.icio.us and expected them to show up automatically the next day… except they didn’t. I traced it down to an errant smart quote that I copied from … Continue reading XML characters, smart quotes and Apache XML-RPC<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,4,2,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}