[dom4j-user] special entities and JAXP

[Robert J. Lebowitz]

While the application I'm writing utilizes dom4j, this question isn't dom4j specific.  I offer it up to the list simply because many of you are proficient with Java and JAXP.... I suspect this is a very simple problem, but one I can't quite decipher yet.  I apologize if the question is misplaced....   I have written a simple editor which utilizes a JTextArea to hold and visualize text.  I have written a simple method to check for well-formedness (you try to come up with a better adjective) of an XML document.  I am using the JAXP classes in conjunction with jdk 1.4.   The text within the JTextArea is extracted using a getDocument().getText() method to obtain a String object.    Well-formedness is determine in the following manner:       public void wellform(String text) throws IOException, SAXException, ParserConfigurationException {         SAXParser parser = factory.newSAXParser();         StringReader reader = new StringReader(text);         parser.parse(new InputSource(reader), new XMLHandler(holder));     }         private static SAXParserFactory factory = SAXParserFactory.newInstance(); XMLHandler is a class I've written to catch certain thrown exceptions.  It extends the DefaultHandler adapter just to simplify matters.   Here's what I don't understand with regards to my application:   If I write a simple one line XML document, say:   <a>testing</a>   everything works just fine and dandy... the document is declared well-formed, and life goes merrily on its way.   However, if I add a second line directly underneath the first line, any line at all, like:   <b>testing</b>   I get back an exception saying:   Illegal character at end of document, &#x3c;. Line 2, column 0.   Now, I know that what apparently is happening, is that the less than character is being interpreted as a special entity.  But what I don't understand is 1) why does it only affect the second line of text, not the first (is there a carriage return or something that JTextArea sticks in?) ?    Is there some feature that I'm supposed to specify for the xmlreader, or saxparser to avoid this problem?  Are there hidden characters coming from the JTextArea I should be aware of, or is there some method I need to modify in my custom ContentHandler (XMLHandler) to overcome this issue???   Hope this makes sense to some of you,   Rob