How to prevent JAXB escaping a string

Question

I have an object, generated by XJC, called Product. I want to set product.currentPrice (a String) to be £210 where £ is the currency symbol (passed in from elsewhere in the system).

Trouble is, JAXB is escaping my ampersand, so it produces £210 instead. How do I make it not do this?

Answer 1

By default, the marshaller implementation of the JAXB usually escapes characters. To change this default behavior you will have to Write a class that implements the com.sun.xml.bind.marshaller.CharacterEscapeHandler interface.

set that handler in the Marshaller

CharacterEscapeHandler escapeHandler = NoEscapeHandler.theInstance;
marshaller.setProperty("com.sun.xml.bind.characterEscapeHandler", escapeHandler); 

You can have a look at samples provided with JAXB, character escaping sample

Answer 2

Like rjsang said, there is a bug when using "UTF-8" encoding, which is the default. If you don't care about the case sensitive issues, try using "utf-8" and get your custom escaper to work as it is supposed to do. Also UTF-16 works, anything but "UTF-8": "uTf-8" and so on.

Awful bug in the standard.

Here is the code to do so:

marshaller.setProperty(javax.xml.bind.Marshaller.JAXB_ENCODING, "utf-8");