Removing invalid characters from XML backups

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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. 

  4. Copy the entities-clean.xml file into another directory, rename it back to entites.xml and create a new ZIP with and the activeobjects.xml file.
  5. Import the new ZIP file, ensuring that it contains both XML files.
Last modified on Apr 6, 2014

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