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I need to retrieve financial data using the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) protocol. In order to do this, I am using JAXB to marshal an object tree into an XML string that specifies data request parameters, and then I am sending this XML string to a bank's server. The bank then responds with an XML string containing the requested data, which I unmarshal into an object tree using JAXB. For the first couple of banks I tried, I received the data back in well-formed XML that conformed to the published OFX schema, and I was able to unmarshal it easily using JAXB.

However, when I requested data from Citigroup, they sent me back the following:

OFXHEADER:100
DATA:OFXSGML
VERSION:102
SECURITY:NONE
ENCODING:USASCII
CHARSET:1252
COMPRESSION:NONE
OLDFILEUID:NONE
NEWFILEUID:NONE

<OFX>
<SIGNONMSGSRSV1>
<SONRS>
<STATUS>
<CODE>0
<SEVERITY>INFO
</STATUS>
<DTSERVER>20150513180826.000
<LANGUAGE>ENG
<FI>
<ORG>Citigroup
<FID>24909
</FI>
</SONRS>
</SIGNONMSGSRSV1>
</OFX>

Note that this is an abbreviated form of the actual output, but it is enough to illustrate the problem. The problem is that I cannot figure out how to use JAXB to unmarshal this content. It is not well-formed XML because (1) it doesn't have an XML header, (2) the custom processing instructions (the first nine lines above) are not enclosed in <?...?> tags, and (3) most importantly, the simpleTypes have only opening tags but no closing tags.

I have searched all over for an answer to this and found a similar XML-ish format in a couple of places, and one of those places indicated that this may even be a valid format for sending XML over the web. But I haven't found any information that can help me unmarshal it or parse it.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I am usually pretty resourceful when it comes to these types of problems (hence why this is my first question on here), but this one has me stumped. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Richard Neish
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ljg43230
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    Thanks for everyone's suggestions. For now I just built a hacky parser to covert the SGML into the XML that I need, and then the JAXB unmarshalling process works fine for me from there. I will come back to it later to build something more robust. In the meantime I am going to leave the question open in case someone comes along with a simple tried and true solution. – ljg43230 May 13 '15 at 22:34
  • Har. That probably is the tried and true solution. – PaulProgrammer Jul 06 '15 at 15:32
  • WRT your hacky parser, if you used a parser generator tool like JavaCC or SableCC, could you post the grammar file? Perhaps as an answer to your own question? – mbmast Dec 20 '15 at 16:43

2 Answers2

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Your basic problem is that the input you show here is not XML, it's SGML (see DATA:OFXSGML). You will have to preprocess it to make it acceptable to an XML parser. The kind of preprocessing you have to do will be application specific, as there's no general mechanism to deal well with that. If you have the SGML DTD, you might be able to get a product such as omnimark to "mostly" fix it up.

PaulProgrammer
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  • Thanks for the SGML tip. Searching here and the web using SGML as a keyword (which I hadn't used before) seems to be yielding some more useful information, so I will work through it, and perhaps it will enable me to cobble together a solution. – ljg43230 May 13 '15 at 20:05
  • search for `OFXSGML` -- it looks like a thing. http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=152118 – PaulProgrammer May 13 '15 at 20:09
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Well , maybe you need to handle this bank services in some other manner, for example when you receive data from this bank maybe read the Stream and maybe try to undetify the beggining of tag and then the end of (read line by line link)the rest of the stream ..free will . After that the string that remains is the XML that you need , so pass it through your already implemented JAXB code.

George Papatheodorou
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