[COMDEV-4] External entity in XML causing null pointer exception during DocumentBuilder.parse

• Type: Question
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Assignee: Ross Gardler
• Reporter: sri kumar
• Created: 03/Dec/09 09:59
• Updated: 04/Dec/09 12:22
• Resolved: 04/Dec/09 12:22

Description

I was trying to parse a XML Document using DOM Parser.

I got null pointer exception while executing doc = builder.parse(xmlDataFile);

There were few entities in the XML data file. On removing a particular entity, i was able to parse the file successfully

The entity was some thing like this

<!ENTITY SAMPLE.TIF SYSTEM "SAMPLE.TIF" NDATA TIF>

What could be the reason?

EDIT:

Here is the code:

DocumentBuilderFactory aFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
aFactory.setValidating(false);
aFactory.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/namespaces", false);
aFactory.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/validation/schema", false);
aFactory.setIgnoringComments(true);
builder = aFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
doc = builder.parse(xmlDataFile);
This is the trace:

at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.dom.DeferredDocumentImpl.setChunkIndex(DeferredDocumentImpl.java:1944)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.dom.DeferredDocumentImpl.appendChild(DeferredDocumentImpl.java:644)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractDOMParser.characters(AbstractDOMParser.java:1191)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.dtd.XMLDTDValidator.characters(XMLDTDValidator.java:862)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:463)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:807)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:737)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:107)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.DOMParser.parse(DOMParser.java:225)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(DocumentBuilderImpl.java:283)
at javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(DocumentBuilder.java:180)
at XMLParser.Parse(XMLParser.java:89)
at Main.main(Main.java:116)

89 line number points to -> doc = builder.parse(xmlDataFile);

Issue Links

• relates to: XERCESJ-977 Null pointer exception during DOM parsing