NullPointerException in xalan parser package

[Guillaume Jeudy]

Hi,

I'm trying to serialize a DOM constructed from the following URL which
is subject to change very frequently:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/world/asia-pacific/rss091.xml

I sometimes receive this error:

java.lang.NullPointerException:
at org.apache.xalan.serialize.WriterToUTF8.write(WriterToUTF8.java:101)
at org.apache.xalan.serialize.SerializerToXML.startElement(SerializerToXML.java,
Compiled Code)
at org.apache.xml.utils.TreeWalker.startNode(TreeWalker.java,
Compiled Code)
at org.apache.xml.utils.TreeWalker.traverse(TreeWalker.java, Compiled
Code)
at org.apache.xalan.serialize.SerializerToXML.serialize(SerializerToXML.java:2470)
at DynamicPortalSearchProcessor.parseDOM(DynamicPortalSearchProcessor.java,
Compiled Code)
at DynamicPortalSearchProcessor.processSearchSite(DynamicPortalSearchProcessor.java,
Compiled Code)
at DynamicPortalSearchThread.run(DynamicPortalSearchThread.java,
Compiled Code)

I suspect this is because the XML source is in ISO-8859-1 encoding and
the xalan serializer that i'm using does not support this encoding
it's trying to use UTF8 encoding... Can anyone help? I'm using the
xalan version "j2_2_D11"

Regards,
Guillaume J.