How to fix Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence

I am trying to fetch the below xml from db using a java method but I am getting an error

Code used to parse the xml

DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder(); InputSource is = new InputSource(new ByteArrayInputStream(cond.getBytes())); Document doc = db.parse(is); Element elem = doc.getDocumentElement(); // here we expect a series of <data><name>N</name><value>V</value></data> NodeList nodes = elem.getElementsByTagName("data"); TableID jobId = new TableID(_processInstanceId); Job myJob = Job.queryByID(_clientContext, jobId, true); if (nodes.getLength() == 0) { log(Level.DEBUG, "No data found on condition XML"); } for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); i++) { // loop through the <data> in the XML Element dataTags = (Element) nodes.item(i); String name = getChildTagValue(dataTags, "name"); String value = getChildTagValue(dataTags, "value"); log(Level.INFO, "UserData/Value=" + name + "/" + value); myJob.setBulkUserData(name, value); } myJob.save(); 

The Data

<ContactDetails>307896043</ContactDetails> <ContactName>307896043</ContactName> <Preferred_Completion_Date> </Preferred_Completion_Date> <service_address>A-End Address: 1ST HELIERST HELIERJT2 3XP832THE CABLES 1 POONHA LANEST HELIER JE JT2 3XP</service_address> <ServiceOrderId>315473043</ServiceOrderId> <ServiceOrderTypeId>50</ServiceOrderTypeId> <CustDesiredDate>2013-03-20T18:12:04</CustDesiredDate> <OrderId>307896043</OrderId> <CreateWho>csmuser</CreateWho> <AccountInternalId>20100333</AccountInternalId> <ServiceInternalId>20766093</ServiceInternalId> <ServiceInternalIdResets>0</ServiceInternalIdResets> <Primary_Offer_Name action='del'>MyMobile Blue &#163;44.99 [12 month term]</Primary_Offer_Name> <Disc_Reason action='del'>8</Disc_Reason> <Sup_Offer action='del'>80000257</Sup_Offer> <Service_Type action='del'>A-01-00</Service_Type> <Priority action='del'>4</Priority> <Account_Number action='del'>0</Account_Number> <Offer action='del'>80000257</Offer> <msisdn action='del'>447797142520</msisdn> <imsi action='del'>234503184</imsi> <sim action='del'>5535</sim> <ocb9_ARM action='del'>false</ocb9_ARM> <port_in_required action='del'> </port_in_required> <ocb9_mob action='del'>none</ocb9_mob> <ocb9_mob_BB action='del'> </ocb9_mob_BB> <ocb9_LandLine action='del'> </ocb9_LandLine> <ocb9_LandLine_BB action='del'> </ocb9_LandLine_BB> <Contact_2> </Contact_2> <Acc_middle_name> </Acc_middle_name> <MarketCode>7</MarketCode> <Acc_last_name>Port_OUT</Acc_last_name> <Contact_1> </Contact_1> <Acc_first_name>.</Acc_first_name> <EmaiId> </EmaiId> 

The ERROR

 org.apache.xerces.impl.io.MalformedByteSequenceException: Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence. 

I read in some threads it's because of some special characters in the xml. How to fix this issue ?

14 Answers

How to fix this issue ?

Read the data using the correct character encoding. The error message means that you are trying to read the data as UTF-8 (either deliberately or because that is the default encoding for an XML file that does not specify <?xml version="1.0" encoding="somethingelse"?>) but it is actually in a different encoding such as ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252.

To be able to advise on how you should do this I'd have to see the code you're currently using to read the XML.

1. Open the xml in notepad
2. Make sure you dont have extra space at the beginning and end of the document.
3. Select File -> Save As
4. select save as type -> All files
5. Enter file name as abcd.xml
6. select Encoding - UTF-8 -> Click Save

Try:

InputStream inputStream= // Your InputStream from your database. Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream,"UTF-8"); InputSource is = new InputSource(reader); is.setEncoding("UTF-8"); saxParser.parse(is, handler); 

If it's anything else than UTF-8, just change the encoding part for the good one.

I was getting the xml as a String and using xml.getBytes() and getting this error. Changing to xml.getBytes(Charset.forName("UTF-8")) worked for me.

I had the same problem in my JSF application which was having a comment line containing some special characters in the XMHTL page. When I compared the previous version in my eclipse it had a comment,

//Some �  special characters found 

Removed those characters and the page loaded fine. Mostly it is related to XML files, so please compare it with the working version.

I had this problem, but the file was in UTF-8, it was just that somehow on character had come in that was not encoded in UTF-8. To solve the problem I did what is stated in this thread, i.e. I validated the file: How to check whether a file is valid UTF-8?

Basically you run the command:

$ iconv -f UTF-8 your_file -o /dev/null

And if there is something that is not encoded in UTF-8 it will give you the line and row numbers so that you can find it.

I happened to run into this problem because of an Ant build.

That Ant build took files and applied filterchain expandproperties to it. During this file filtering, my Windows machine's implicit default non-UTF-8 character encoding was used to generate the filtered files - therefore characters outside of its character set could not be mapped correctly.

One solution was to provide Ant with an explicit environment variable for UTF-8. In Cygwin, before launching Ant: export ANT_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8".

This error comes when you are trying to load jasper report file with the extension .jasper For Example c://reports//EmployeeReport.jasper" While you should load jasper report file with the extension .jrxml For Example c://reports//EmployeeReport.jrxml" [See Problem Screenshot ][1] [1]: [See Solution Screenshot][2] [2]: 

I had a similar problem. I had saved some xml in a file and when reading it into a DOM document, it failed due to special character. Then I used the following code to fix it:

String enco = new String(Files.readAllBytes(Paths.get(listPayloadPath+"/Payload.xml")), StandardCharsets.UTF_8); Document doc = builder.parse(new ByteArrayInputStream(enco.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8))); 

Let me know if it works for you.

I have met the same problem and after long investigation of my XML file I found the problem: there was few unescaped characters like « ».

Those like me who understand character encoding principles, also read Joel's article which is funny as it contains wrong characters anyway and still can't figure out what the heck (spoiler alert, I'm Mac user) then your solution can be as simple as removing your local repo and clone it again.

My code base did not change since the last time it was running OK so it made no sense to have UTF errors given the fact that our build system never complained about it....till I remembered that I accidentally unplugged my computer few days ago with IntelliJ Idea and the whole thing running (Java/Tomcat/Hibernate)

My Mac did a brilliant job as pretending nothing happened and I carried on business as usual but the underlying file system was left corrupted somehow. Wasted the whole day trying to figure this one out. I hope it helps somebody.

I had the same issue. My problem was it was missing “-Dfile.encoding=UTF8” argument under the JAVA_OPTION in statWeblogic.cmd file in WebLogic server.

You have a library that needs to be erased Like the following library

 implementation 'org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-surefire-plugin:2.4.3' 

This error surprised me in production...

The error is because the char encoding is wrong, so the best solution is implement a way to auto detect the input charset.

This is one way to do it:

... import org.xml.sax.InputSource; ... InputSource inputSource = new InputSource(inputStream); someReader( inputSource.getByteStream(), inputSource.getEncoding() ); 

Input sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <rss xmlns:dc="" version="2.0"> <channel> ...