Stefan Bodewig - 2026-07-31

XMLUnit for Java 2.13.0 adds new options allowing people to strengthen the security of the XML parser used during validation or XPath evaluation and adds an option to specify the locale used to parse patterns in the isDateTime placeholder.

Full list of changes:

  • added explicit settings to the Validator classes that disable (external) DTD loading during validation. The default
    remains to allow loading of external content as this is often a requirement during validation.

PRs #331 and #332 by
@jmestwa-coder

  • added constructor overloads to JAXPXPathEngine to allow specifying the DocumentBuilderFactory used for the
    Source overloads of the selectNodes and evaluate methods.

PRs #333 by @jmestwa-coder

  • IsDateTimePlaceholderHandler now parses the explicit and ISO date formats using Locale.US rather than the JVM
    default locale so results no longer depend on the host locale. An optional second argument allows specifying a
    different locale as a BCP 47 language tag.

PR #335 by @jmestwa-coder

XMLUnit.NET adds an option to specify the culture used to parse patterns in the isDateTime placeholder.

Full list of changes:

  • IsDateTimePlaceholderHandler now supports an optional second argument specifying a
    different CultureInfo than the invariant culture used by default as
    CultureInfo name like de or fr-FR.

Also modified the logic when no argument is present to still try
parsing using the current culture and then trying a set of ISO
patterns using the invariant culture in turn - making isDateTime
match what the Java version does mor closely.

PR #54 based on
PR xmlunit/#335 by @jmestwa-coder