Incorrect encoding in xml element using dom4j with Spring MVC

Question

I've created an AbstractView in order to output some XML to the browser, as follows:

public abstract class AbstractXmlView extends AbstractView {

public AbstractXmlView() {
    setContentType("application/xml");
}

@Override
protected void renderMergedOutputModel(Map<String, Object> model,
        HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
        throws Exception {

    response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

    Document document = new DOMDocument();
    document.setXMLEncoding("UTF-8");

    buildXmlDocument(model, document, request, response);

    response.getOutputStream().print(document.asXML());
}

public abstract void buildXmlDocument(Map<String, Object> model,
        Document document, HttpServletRequest request,
        HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception;

As you can see, my subclasses would define the buildXMLDocument method in order to populate the XML Document that would be actually delivered to the browser, so here's a simplified implementation:

public class GetXmlContacts extends AbstractXmlView {

@Override
public void buildXmlDocument(Map<String, Object> model, Document document,
        HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
        throws Exception {

    Element node = document.addElement("node");
    node.setText ("I'm unicode áéíóú");
}

Please note the literal string as text in the element node "I'm unicode áéíóú". When I request this to the server, I obtain an HTTP response with UTF-8 encoding (OK), the XML definition says it's UTF-8, but the node's text would be encoded as ISO-8859-1 (this is my guess, because when I change the encoding with Firefox that string looks OK).

So, why is dom4j enconding a literal string as ISO when it's defined that should be UTF-8? Is there something wrong with my code? Thanks

Joaquín L. Robles · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-26 17:46:17Z

1

Solved! Because some bug with dom4j, element.setText() wouldn't care of the specified encoding and document.asXML() would return an ISO string, so I modified that line as follows:

response.getOutputStream().write(document.asXML().getBytes("UTF-8"));

And everything worked OK..

answered Sep 26, 2012 at 17:46

Joaquín L. Robles

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1 Comment

forty-two Over a year ago

Well, setText() is not the problem. The problem is that serializing the Document to XML is not consistent. Doxument#asXML() is not to meant to be a "proper" way of doing it. However, the documentation does not mention it--DOM4J in a nutshell. There's too much rope to avoid hanging yourself. You should instead use an XMLWriter.

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