Psuedo Guru Blog by a wannabe guru with spelling issues.

Branch target offset too large for short

I was trying to compile a rather large XSLT file using the built-in Java 1.5.x libraries, and ran into the following error:

Branch target offset too large for short

Seems that this is a bug in the version of Xalan that ships with Java (or maybe a bug in the XSLTC sub-component, I'm not exactly sure).

After spending a few hours googling and tweaking my code to try to work around this bug, I finally downloaded Saxon, put saxon.jar in my project classpath, and that fixed the problem. I used Saxon-B 9.1.

Accessing a Java resource as a file

Here is some quick and dirty code to get access to a resource on the class path as a File object:

URL url = this.getClass().getResource("/the-file.txt");
URI uri = new URI(url.toExternalForm());
File f = new File(uri);

Obviously replace "/the-file.txt" with the actual path to the resource. Note: this is the path on the "class path", not the file system.