Remove illegal XML characters

A recent issue where some parsed text generated from PDFbox required to be transformed using XSLT highlighted issues with illegal characters in the content. This was part of an ant task and therefore a simple replaceregex solved the issue. The matter was complicated by characters that had not correctly translated to UTF-8, notably the greek π character. Therefore a couple of regexes were required to resolve the issue. The first matches all characters that are not part of the XML specification, the next is specific to the the π character

<target name="remove-illegal">
 <replaceregexp match="[^\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\uD7FF\uE000-\uFFFD\u10000-u10FFFF]" replace="" flags="g" encoding="utf-8">
  <fileset dir="PDFbox-text" includes="*.txt **/*.txt"/>
 </replaceregexp>
 <replaceregexp match="[\\xcf]" replace="" flags="gs" encoding="utf-8">
  <fileset dir="PDFbox-text" includes="*.txt **/*.txt"/>
 </replaceregexp>
</target>

Ant XSLT task for saxon transformations

As the Saxon AntTransform is no longer supported it is recommended to use the standard Ant XSLT task (see XSLT Task for documentation.

Example code is given below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="opsi" default="transformer" basedir=".">

 <property file="ant.properties"/>
 <property name="source.xml" location="share.xml"/>
 <property name="output.xml" location="output.xml"/>
 <!-- home directroy for Saxon  -->
 <property name="saxon.jar" location="saxon/saxon9.jar"/>

 <path id="saxon.classpath">
  <pathelement location="${saxon.jar}"/>
  <pathelement location="saxon/saxon9he.jar"/>
 </path>

 <target name="transformer">  
  <xslt in="${source.xml}"
      out="${output.xml}"
      style="share.xslt"
      processor="trax">
   <factory name="net.sf.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl"/>
   <classpath refid="saxon.classpath" />
  </xslt>  
 </target>

</project>

Ant Task for FOP

There is an ant task for FOP

For FOP 0.95 see http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.95/anttask.html

For FOP 1.0 see http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/1.0/anttask.html

for full details

<property name="fop.home" value="....path to your FOP HOME directory..."/>

<taskdef name="fop"
         classname="org.apache.fop.tools.anttasks.Fop">
  <classpath>
    <fileset dir="${fop.home}/lib">
      <include name="*.jar"/>
    </fileset>
    <fileset dir="${fop.home}/build">
      <include name="fop.jar"/>
      <include name="fop-hyph.jar" />
    </fileset>
  </classpath>
</taskdef>

<target name="generate-pdf" description="Generates a single PDF file">
   <fop format="application/pdf"
        fofile="c:\working\foDirectory\foDocument.fo"
        outfile="c:\working\pdfDirectory\pdfDocument.pdf" />
</target>

<target name="generate-multiple-pdfs"
        description="Generates multiple PDF files">
   <fop format="application/pdf"
        outdir="${build.dir}" messagelevel="debug">
        <fileset dir="${fo.examples.dir}">
           <include name="*.fo"/>
        </fileset>
   </fop>
</target>