Use Unchecked JDOM Factory
import org.jdom.Document; import org.jdom.UncheckedJDOMFactory; import org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder; import org.xml.sax.XMLReader; import com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XMLParser; public class UncheckedFactorySample { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder(); builder.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/validation", false); builder.setFactory(new UncheckedJDOMFactory()); Document doc = builder.build("bad.xml"); System.out.println(doc.getRootElement().getName()); } }