[dom4j-user] Entity expansion limit?

Chip Whitmer Fri, 09 Jul 2004 18:22:35 -0700

Hi -- I'm new here. :-)

I am working with some large XML files (~6MB) that serve as indexes into hundreds of smaller XML content files. The large index files include element attributes whose value is an XPath string, something like this:

Each index file contains thousands of these elements. As the indexes have grown larger, I have started seeing the following exception:

org.dom4j.DocumentException: Error on line 31111 of document: Parser has reached the entity expansion limit "64,000" set by the Application. Nested exception: Parser has reached the entity expansion limit "64,000" set by the Application.

at org.dom4j.io.SAXReader.read(SAXReader.java:355)

at org.dom4j.io.SAXReader.read(SAXReader.java:297)

The problem seems to be all of those "'" entities. (There are as many as 85,000 of them in some of the files.) But the apostrophes are required by the XPath syntax. So I have a few questions:

1) Why does this 64,000-entity limit exist?

2) The error message says the limit was "set by the Application." Does this mean there is a configurable limit that I can modify to avoid the exception?

3) The problem goes away if I manually replace all the entities ( ' ) with character references ( ' ). However, my code sets the dom4j attribute value using a plain apostrophe in a Java string:

pageElement.addAttribute( "xpath", "/sm/[EMAIL PROTECTED]'09_02_0045']" );

dom4j is apparently converting the apostrophes to entities as the document is written to disk. Is there a way to tell dom4j to write the data using character references, rather than entities?

Thanks,

- Chip Whitmer

Mobile Productivity, Inc.

[dom4j-user] Entity expansion limit?

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