> &#a9 should be a copyright symbol if you're using ASCII. > > I suspect that &#a9 is being used instead of a newline (0xa) followed by > a tab (0x9).
Actually it was a typo on my part. It's using 	 :( *oops* > My guess is that your JVM's file.encoding system property used to be > something like ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 and now it's been changed to > something that is more exotic, perhaps even mandating 16-bit characters > (though your pages would be horribly jumbled if everything were > interpreted at 16-bit characters). > > Check the file.encoding of your JVM in the old, working system relative > to the new, broken one. Also, check to make sure that your XML files > have the "encoding" set in the <?xml?> processing instruction, and that > the encoding actually matches what you used when you wrote the file to > the disk. Finally, check to see if you have BOM characters at the start > of your XML files. > > This is likely to solve both of your problems. I wrote a little JSP page to spit out the System.getProperty("file.encoding") value and got some surprising results. I tried two of the existing machines and got ISO-8859-1 for one and ANSI_X3.4-1968 for the other. The application runs fine on both of them. On the new server that too is giving out ISO-8859-1. That said, we did an experiment last night and copied the entire previous Tomcat folder over to the new CentOS server and ran it with Sun JDK 1.4.29 - the problem disappeared. When we ran it with JDK 1.5 or 1.6 the problem manifested itself. So the problem appears to related to the JDK in some way. Googling I came up with this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1059854/how-do-you-prevent-a-javax-transformer-from-escaping-whitespace Which makes me wonder if the old Xalan from our previous Tomcat is having issues with JDK 1.5 and up. I guess an Xalan upgrade is in order. > NB: Tomcat 5.0 has been retired and really should be replaced. Upgrading > to Tomcat 6.0 shouldn't be too much trouble. Only issue there is we have to support this legacy application for another 12 months and it's a "hand me down" so we have little or no source code or documentation. Porting it now would take up more time/effort than is financially viable right now :( - J