Error parsing XHTML The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup

Question

As an extension of this question  I m trying to insert Javascript to a  lt h commandButton   gt  s onclick property as action is already rendering an ajax table   What I want to do  Get the selected items in a list box and turn them into parameters to be used in a JSF FileServlet  i e  para2 value1 amp param value2 amp param value3  Here s what I have    lt script type   text javascript  gt  function myScript         var box   document getElementbyId  myForm box        var length   box options length      var paramstring           for  var i   0  i  lt  length  i              if  i     length - 1                if  box options i  selected                    paramstring   paramstring    param     box options i  value     amp amp                            else               paramstring   paramstring    param     box options i  value                      if  document getElementById  myForm checkbox   checked            window location  fileServlet    paramstring           lt  script gt      What I get when page is loaded  javax servlet ServletException  Error Parsing  page xhtml  Error Traced line 15  The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup   What doesn t trigger exception    lt script type   text javascript  gt  function myScript         var box   document getElementbyId  myForm box        var length   box options length      var paramstring            if  document getElementById  myForm checkbox   checked            window location  fileServlet    paramstring           lt  script gt     As soon as I add in for  var i   0  i  lt  length  i    or even for  var i   0  i  lt  10  i    the page wouldn t load  Why does it not like the for loop

User · Answer

I ran across this post today as I was running into the same issue and had the same problem of the javascript not running with the CDATA tags listed above. I corrected the CDATA tags to look like:

<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[ 

your javascript code here

//]]>
</script>

Then everything worked perfectly!

User · Answer

Facelets is a XML based view technology which uses XHTML XML to generate HTML output  XML has five special characters which has special treatment by the XML parser    lt  the start of a tag   gt  the end of a tag   quot  the start and end of an attribute value    the alternative start and end of an attribute value   amp  the start of an entity  which ends with      In case of  lt   the XML parser is implicitly looking for the tag name and the end tag  gt   However  in your particular case  you were using  lt  as a JavaScript operator  not as an XML entity  This totally explains the XML parsing error you got   The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup   In essence  you re writing JavaScript code in the wrong place  a XML document instead of a JS file  so you should be escaping all XML special characters accordingly  The  lt  must be escaped as  amp lt   So  essentially  the for  var i   0  i  lt  length  i       must become for  var i   0  i  amp lt  length  i       to make it XML-valid  However  this makes the JavaScript code harder to read and maintain  As stated in Mozilla Developer Network s excellent document Writing JavaScript for XHTML  you should be placing the JavaScript code in a character data  CDATA  block  Thus  in JSF terms  that would be   lt h outputScript gt       lt   CDATA                        gt   lt  h outputScript gt   The XML parser will interpret the block s contents as  quot plain vanilla quot  character data and not as XML and hence interpret the XML special characters  quot as-is quot   But  much better is to just put the JS code in its own JS file which you include by  lt script src gt   or in JSF terms  the  lt h outputScript gt    lt h outputScript name  quot functions js quot  target  quot head quot    gt   This way you don t need to worry about XML-special characters in your JS code  Additional advantage is that this gives the browser the opportunity to cache the JS file so that average response size is smaller  See also   The entity name must immediately follow the   39  amp   39  in the entity reference Is it possible to use JSF Facelets with HTML 4 5  How to reference CSS   JS   image resource in Facelets template  Writing JavaScript for XHTML

User · Answer

I had a git conflict left in my workspace xml  i e     lt  lt  lt  lt                      HEAD   which caused the unknown tag error  It is a bit annoying that it doesn   t name the file

User · Answer

Sometimes you will need this        lt   CDATA          gt      and not only this      lt   CDATA      gt

User · Answer

I solved this converting the JSP from XHTML to HTML  doing this in the begining    lt   page language  java  contentType  text html  charset UTF-8  pageEncoding  UTF-8   gt    lt  DOCTYPE html PUBLIC  -  W3C  DTD HTML 4 01 Transitional  EN   http   www w3 org TR html4 loose dtd  gt    lt html gt

[javascript] Error parsing XHTML: The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup

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