How to use "&" and other HTML entities as text content?

xmlutil version: v0.80.0
platform: Android

Hi, I was decoding some XML from a third party and I noticed that decodeFromString was failing when the XML response had “&” or other HTML entities (like “'” for single quote) as text content inside an element/tag.

After finding that, I tried to create a simple example and I would like some help to understand how to deal with “&”.

Example:

If I use encodeToString to encode the following content:

@Serializable
data class Results(
    val itemList: List<Item>
)

@Serializable
data class Item(
    @XmlValue(true)
    val text: String
)

[...]

val content =
    Results(
        listOf(
            Item("Item ' 1"),
            Item("Item & 2")
        )
    )

I get this XML as a result:

<Results>
  <Item>Item ' 1</Item>
  <Item>Item &amp; 2</Item>
</Results>

and now, if I use that same result output with decodeFromString I get an error

nl.adaptivity.xmlutil.XmlException: Found unexpected child tag: ENTITY_REF

---

I also noticed that, if I remove @XmlValue(true) and use “&” inside an attribute

<Results>
  <Item text="Item ' 1" />
  <Item text="Item &amp; 2" />
</Results>

the decoding goes perfectly.

What’s the correct way of decoding XML that has “&” as text inside an element?

[pdvrieze]

Now fixed in 0.80.1

[pdvrieze]

@micwallace I’m not sure what you mean about this. Do you mean that it stores the text in memory/Kotlin without entities (unescaped) and only encodes on serialization. That is something that cannot really be changed.