Reading escape characters with XMLStreamReader

To force XMLStreamReader to return a single string, you have to set the javax.xml.stream.isCoalescing property as indicated by the XMLStreamReader#next() documentation:

XMLInputFactory factory = XMLInputFactory.newInstance();
factory.setProperty("javax.xml.stream.isCoalescing", true);  // decode entities into one string
XMLStreamReader xmlStreamReader = factory.createXMLStreamReader(stringReader);

I'm not sure what the problem is - my test produces the results you expect.

Running

XMLInputFactory xmlInputFactory = XMLInputFactory.newInstance();
XMLStreamReader reader = xmlInputFactory.createXMLStreamReader(
     new StringReader("<tag>foo&amp;bar</tag>"));
PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(System.out, true);
while (reader.hasNext())
{
    reader.next();
    pw.print(reader.getEventType());
    if (reader.hasText())
        pw.append(' ').append(reader.getText());
    pw.println();
}

Produces

1
4 foo
4 &
4 bar
2
8

On JDK 1.6.0.11 - rather old I know. I'll upgrade and post back if results differ.

One thing to bear in mind is that the XMLStreamReader can (and does!) break up character data into several blocks, as you see above - the repeated 4 events (4=CHARACTERS) indicates the text of the element is sent as 3 events.