How to print the escape characters as it is while using PrettyPrintWriter?

Question

Using PrettyPrintWriter to pretty print the xml file In the generated xml file the ' (apostrophe) is getting written as &apos Want it to print as '

Using the following xstream.marshal(obj, new PrettyPrintWriter(writer)) to pretty print ,any suggestions on how to print the escape characters as it is?

Answer 1

You can provide your own implementation of PrettyPrintWriter, which extends that class and overrides its writeText(QuickWriter, String) method.

In its most basic form that would be something like this:

import com.thoughtworks.xstream.core.util.QuickWriter;
import com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.PrettyPrintWriter;
import java.io.Writer;

public class MyPrettyPrintWriter extends PrettyPrintWriter {

    public MyPrettyPrintWriter(Writer writer) {
        super(writer);
    }

    @Override
    public void writeText(QuickWriter writer, String string) {
        writer.write(string); 
    }
}

You would use this as follows:

String s = "Foo'Bar";
XStream xstream = new XStream();
FileWriter writer = new FileWriter("my_demo.xml");
xstream.marshal(s, new MyPrettyPrintWriter(writer));

The output file contains the following:

<string>Foo'Bar</string>

---

This is basic - it just passes the tag contents through to the file unchanged - nothing is escaped.

You are OK for content containing ", ' and >. But this will be a problem for text containing > and & - which should still be escaped. So you can enhance your writeText method to handle those cases as needed. See What characters do I need to escape in XML documents? for more details.

Note also this is only for text values - not for XML attributes. There is a separate writeAttributeValue method for that (probably not needed in your scenario).

---

It is worth adding: There should be no need to do any of this. The XML is valid, with escaped values such as '. Any process (any half-way decent XML library or tool) reading that data should handle them correctly.