[SUREFIRE-456] Surefire doubly XML-escapes non-visible control characters

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 2.4.2
• Component/s: xml generation
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Daniel Fabulich
• Created: 11/Feb/08 16:23
• Updated: 31/Jan/15 13:43
• Resolved: 25/Nov/14 14:47

Description

It's illegal to include a non-visible control character in XML, even as a character entity. e.g. "�" is illegal in XML, even though it's semantically meaningful.

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210#charsets

Disturbingly, Java's XML serializer will cheerfully print out � despite the fact that it will refuse to parse that entity.

As a workaround, for 2.4.2 we're deliberately doublly XML-escaping non-visible control characters, printing them as "�" instead of "�" like they're supposed to be. That's better than any alternative I can think of (e.g. throwing the characters away in test results, replacing them with a "?" character).