How to handle special characters when uploading to Confluence with storage format?

[Jacob Young]

I am creating a table in Java using the Confluence storage format and XML-RPC. My table looks like this:

<table><tbody>
<tr><th>Carrier</th><th>Number of Devices</th></tr>
<tr>
<td>Verizon</td>
<td>6 (3.59%)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Sprint</td>
<td>2 (1.19%)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>AT&T</td>
<td>6 (3.59%)</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>

I get the following error, which I am sure is because of the "&" symbol in "AT&T":

Exception in thread "main" org.apache.xmlrpc.XmlRpcException: java.lang.Exception: com.atlassian.confluence.rpc.RemoteException: [com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxLazyException] com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxUnexpectedCharException: Unexpected character '<' (code 60); expected a semi-colon after the reference for entity 'T'

How do I deal with this? I still want the "&" symbol to show up in my table in Confluence.

[Jacob Young · Accepted solution]

Figured it out... Turns out that instead of just "&", you need "&amp;".

Atlassian, you should have a page somewhere that lists all of the additional "escape" characters needed for special characters such as this. Or just update your storage format so that it is automatically taken care of.

[Joe Clark]

Hi @Jacob Young - our documentation is located @ https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+Storage+Format The storage format is XHTML-based, so the APIs will only accept well-formed, valid XML as input. The list of XML reserved characters is available online. Here's a good reference from Wikipedia, for example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references

[Jacob Young]

Ah, thank you!