> &#a9 should be a copyright symbol if you're using ASCII.
>
> I suspect that &#a9 is being used instead of a newline (0xa) followed by
> a tab (0x9).
Actually it was a typo on my part. It's using 	 :( *oops*
> My guess is that your JVM's file.encoding system property used to be
> something like ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 and now it's been changed to
> something that is more exotic, perhaps even mandating 16-bit characters
> (though your pages would be horribly jumbled if everything were
> interpreted at 16-bit characters).
>
> Check the file.encoding of your JVM in the old, working system relative
> to the new, broken one. Also, check to make sure that your XML files
> have the "encoding" set in the <?xml?> processing instruction, and that
> the encoding actually matches what you used when you wrote the file to
> the disk. Finally, check to see if you have BOM characters at the start
> of your XML files.
>
> This is likely to solve both of your problems.
I wrote a little JSP page to spit out the System.getProperty("file.encoding")
value and got some surprising results. I tried two of the existing machines and
got ISO-8859-1
for one and ANSI_X3.4-1968 for the other. The application runs fine on both of
them. On the new server that too is giving out ISO-8859-1.
That said, we did an experiment last night and copied the entire previous
Tomcat folder over to the new CentOS server and ran it with Sun JDK 1.4.29 -
the problem disappeared. When we ran it with JDK 1.5 or 1.6 the problem
manifested itself.
So the problem appears to related to the JDK in some way. Googling I came up
with this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1059854/how-do-you-prevent-a-javax-transformer-from-escaping-whitespace
Which makes me wonder if the old Xalan from our previous Tomcat is having
issues with JDK 1.5 and up. I guess an Xalan upgrade is in order.
> NB: Tomcat 5.0 has been retired and really should be replaced. Upgrading
> to Tomcat 6.0 shouldn't be too much trouble.
Only issue there is we have to support this legacy application for another 12
months and it's a "hand me down" so we have little or no source code or
documentation. Porting it now would take up more time/effort than is
financially viable right now :(
- J
