“[Fatal Error] :1:120: The processing instruction target matching ”[xX][mM][lL]“ is not allowed.” [duplicate]

Answer 1

There is unwanted content may be space of other noisy thing before the starting of you xml namely :

<?xml version='1.0'?>

Make sure there is nothing before the starting of your xml . This will solve the problem , One related example is :

related reference

Answer 2

I recently was working on a Spring MVC startup project sample where I used maven built tool. When I run my server using jetty I got this processing instruction error and I found that my web.xml was having an extra tag before the <xml> tag and it started with the <DOCTYPE> tag instead.

So I removed the below tag which was the start tag,

<!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN" "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd" >

and had the below tag,

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

as the start tag of my web.xml and it solved my issue.

Note: Please ensure there is no comments, tags, free spaces or any unwanted characters left before the <?xml ...?> tag. This will mainly throw these type of error while parsing the xml files.