org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog

Question

I have a Java based web service client connected to Java web service (implemented on the Axis1 framework).

I am getting following exception in my log file:

Answer 1

I had the same problem (and solved it) while trying to parse an XML document with freemarker.

I had no spaces before the header of XML file.

The problem occurs when and only when the file encoding and the XML encoding attribute are different. (ex: UTF-8 file with UTF-16 attribute in header).

So I had two ways of solving the problem:

1. changing the encoding of the file itself
2. changing the header UTF-16 to UTF-8

Answer 2

First clean project, then rebuild project. I was also facing the same issue. Everything came alright after this.

Answer 3

For all those that get this error: WARNING: Catalina.start using conf/server.xml: Content is not allowed in prolog.

Not very informative.. but what this actually means is that there is garbage in your conf/server.xml file.

I have seen this exact error in other XML files.. this error can be caused by making changes with a text editor which introduces the garbage.

The way you can verify whether or not you have garbage in the file is to open it with a "HEX Editor" If you see any character before this string

     "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>"

like this would be garbage

     "‰ŠŒ<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>"

that is your problem.... The Solution is to use a good HEX Editor.. One that will allow you to save files with differing types of encoding..

Then just save it as UTF-8. Some systems that use XML files may need it saved as UTF NO BOM Which means with "NO Byte Order Mark"

Hope this helps someone out there!!

Answer 4

Even I had faced a similar problem. Reason was some garbage character at the beginning of the file.

Fix : Just open the file in a text editor(tested on Sublime text) remove any indent if any in the file and copy paste all the content of the file in a new file and save it. Thats it!. When I ran the new file it ran without any parsing errors.

Answer 5

In my case I got this error because the API I used could return the data either in XML or in JSON format. When I tested it using a browser, it defaulted to the XML format, but when I invoked the same call from a Java application, the API returned the JSON formatted response, that naturally triggered a parsing error.

Answer 6

I had the same issue with spring

MarshallingMessageConverter

and by pre-proccess code.

Mayby someone will need reason: BytesMessage #readBytes - reading bytes.. and i forgot that reading is one direction operation. You can not read twice.