SAXParser '&' concatenation problem

Question

I am presently using SAXParser with SAXParserFactory, and I have run into a problem with strings being cuttoff at '&' symbols. For example: "Nation Created Our World & everything in it" becomes "everything in it".

Obviously, I dont want this to happen. In the xml input, the character is properly escaped as &. How can I resolve this?

try{
            SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
            SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser();

            /* Get the XMLReader of the SAXParser we created. */
            XMLReader r = sp.getXMLReader();

            //This handles the xml and populates the entries array
            XMLHandler handler = new XMLHandler();


            // register event handlers
            r.setContentHandler(handler);
            String url = "http://foobar.xml";
            r.parse(url);

            return handler.getEntries();
}

I have this in my DefaultHandler class

....
    public void characters( char ch[], int start, int length ){
           String value = new String( ch , start , length );

           if(!value.trim().equals("")) {

               if( currentElement.equalsIgnoreCase("TITLE") ) {
                   tempEntry.setTitle(value);
               }
....

Answer 1

The SAX API does not guarantee that any given text node will be delivered in one piece. It is permitted to break it up into multiple calls to the characters() method. Your application has to accommodate this possibly, and reassemble the pieces itself.

Incidentally, Nation Created Our World & everything in it is not a valid XML text fragment, it would have to be Nation Created Our World & everything in it. In this case the SAX parser may be breaking it up into Nation Created Our World, & and everything in it, and your app is only remembering the last one.

Answer 2

Thanks skaffman

Implementation,

public void startElement(String s, String s1, String elementName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException {
    // clear tmpValue on start of element
    tmpValue = "";
}

public void characters(char[] ac, int i, int j) throws SAXException {
    tmpValue += new String(ac, i, j);
}