Java file: Content not allowed in prolog

Question

I\'m new to Spring and started using the Sprint Tool Suite (eclipse) and see this error in a java file in my maven project: \"Content is not allowed in prolog\". This preve

Answer 1

It seems likely that the culprit was a corrupted eclipse workspace. I created a new workspace and imported the project and everything works fine. That would also explain why an external maven build didn't show any problems.

As noted in update 3, I had found some eclipse-generated xml files that had characters before the prolog. Although correcting those did not fix the problems, I didn't inspect every eclipse file with xml content (like the user prefs) to see if they had some invisible characters before the prolog.

Don't know what would have caused it to be corrupted except for perhaps force quitting eclipse during an unresponsive maven repo update but I can't be certain if that's when my troubles started. I'm just glad I can move forward.