Stripping Invalid XML characters in Java

Question

I have an XML file that's the output from a database. I'm using the Java SAX parser to parse the XML and output it in a different format. The XML contains some invalid characters and the parser is throwing errors like 'Invalid Unicode character (0x5)'

Is there a good way to strip all these characters out besides pre-processing the file line-by-line and replacing them? So far I've run into 3 different invalid characters (0x5, 0x6 and 0x7). It's a ~4gb database dump and we're going to be processing it a bunch of times, so having to wait an extra 30 minutes each time we get a new dump to run a pre-processor on it is going to be a pain, and this isn't the first time I've run into this issue.

Answer 1

I used Xalan org.apache.xml.utils.XMLChar class:

public static String stripInvalidXmlCharacters(String input) {     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();     for (int i = 0; i < input.length(); i++) {         char c = input.charAt(i);         if (XMLChar.isValid(c)) {             sb.append(c);         }     }      return sb.toString(); }