Removing invalid characters from XML backups

Usage FAQ

On this page

Still need help?

The Atlassian Community is here for you.

Ask the community

JIRA 3.1 and above should not suffer from this problem. Invalid characters are automatically stripped from imported data

In older versions of JIRA it was possible to cut & paste text containing control characters into JIRA issue fields. This causes problems, because JIRA's backup format is XML, and XML does not allow for the storage of most control characters .When XML containing control characters is imported into JIRA, the import fails with an error:

To fix this, the control characters will need to be removed from the JIRA backup file. This can be done with the following:

  1. Download atlassian-xml-cleaner-0.1.jar
  2. Open a command prompt and locate the XML or ZIP backup file on your computer, ensuring that it is extracted if it's within a ZIP file. In this example, we will use entities.xml.
  3. Run the application with the below:

    $ java -jar atlassian-xml-cleaner-0.1.jar entities.xml > entities-clean.xml

    This will create a copy of entities.xml as entities-clean.xml with the invalid characters removed. The entities-clean.xml will be able to be imported without the above errors now.

Last modified on Oct 30, 2012

Was this helpful?

Yes
No
Provide feedback about this article
Powered by Confluence and Scroll Viewport.