invalid byte 2 of 2-byte UTF-8 sequence

Question

I am trying to parse an XML file with <?version = 1.0, encoding = UTF-8> but ran into an error message invalid byte 2 of 2-byte UTF-8 sequence. Does anybody know what caused this problem?

Answer 1

Either the parser is set for UTF-8 even though the file is encoded otherwise, or the file is declared as using UTF-8 but it really doesn't.

Answer 2

For those who still get such mistake.

since UTF-8 is being used check out your xml document for any latin letters or so: I had the same problem and the reason was i had this:

<n:name>Åke Jógvan Øyvind</n:name>

Hope this helps

Answer 3

I had the same problem. My problem was that I created a new XML file with jdom and the FileWriter(xmlFile). The FileWriter was not able to create a UTF-8 File. Instead using the FileOutputStream(xmlFile) solved it.

Answer 4

I had the same problem too when trying import my .xml file into my java tool. And I found a good solution for this: 1. Open the .xml file with Notepad++ then save the .xml file as .rtf file. Then open this file in WordPad application. 2. Save the .rtf file as .txt file, then open it with Notepad, and save it as .xml file again. When saving in Notepad, near the end of the pop-up window, make sure choosing the option "Encoding: UTF-8". It worked for mine, hope it's useful for yours too.

Answer 5

You could try to change default character encoding used by String.getBytes() to utf-8. Use VM option -Dfile.encoding=utf-8.

Answer 6

Most commonly it's due to feeding ISO-8859-x (Latin-x, like Latin-1) but parser thinking it is getting UTF-8. Certain sequences of Latin-1 characters (two consecutive characters with accents or umlauts) form something that is invalid as UTF-8, and specifically such that based on first byte, second byte has unexpected high-order bits.

This can easily occur when some process dumps out XML using Latin-1, but either forgets to output XML declaration (in which case XML parser must default to UTF-8, as per XML specs), or claims it's UTF-8 even when it isn't.