How can I parse broken XML files in Java? [duplicate]

Question

I'm receiving XML files from an external source over which I have no control. Some of the XML files are broken. Specifically, towards the end of the file, some closing tags are missing. It goes something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<a>
  <b>
    <c/>
  </b>
  <b>
    <c/>
</a>

I think our system will be fine if we simply ignore the elements that don't have a matching closing tag.

What library can I use to parse what I can from such XML files?

Answer 1

You will need to manually parse it yourself, no XML parser will work on XML that's not well formed. One possibility is to use a SAX parser, it will parse the document up to the error then stop.