How to unescape non-standard characters in XML in Java?

Question

I realize a similar question has been asked before, and the solution is to use StringEscapeUtils.unescape() . However, per the method description:

Supports only the five basic XML entities (gt, lt, quot, amp, apos). Does not support DTDs or external entities.

I have a bunch of XML files with escaped characters like ␣ and &hyph; . How can I unescape these? They are defined in the DTD provided. Is there a method like StringEscapeUtils but one with DTD support?

Answer 1

Hmm, it's been a long time, but I think an implementation of EntityResolver2 (Java SDK) handles externally defined entities. This is part of the SAX2 specification.