XElement.Load Error reading ampersand symbols and

Question

I'm having problems reading the ampersand symbol from an XML file:

XElement xmlElements = XElement.Load(Path_Xml_Data_File);

I get error when I have:

<Name>Patrick & Phill</Name>

Error: Name cannot begin with the ' ' character, hexadecimal value 0x20. Xml.XmlException) A System.Xml.XmlException was thrown: "Name cannot begin with the ' ' character

Or with special Portuguese characters:

<Extra>Direc&ccedil;&atilde;o Assistida</Extra> (= <Extra>Direcção Assistida</Extra>)

Error: Reference to undeclared entity 'ccedil'

Any idea how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

I'm afraid that you're dealing with malformed XML.

To represent the ampersand, the data that you're loading should use the "&" entity.

The ç (ç) and ã (ã) named entities are not part of the XML standard, they are more commonly found in HTML (although they can be added to XML by the use of a DTD).

You could use HtmlTidy to tidy up the data first, or you could write something to convert the bare ampersands into entities on the incoming files.

For example:

public string CleanUpData(string data)
{
    var r = new Regex(@"&\s");
    string output = r.Replace(data, "& ");
    output = output.Replace("ç", "ç");
    output = output.Replace("ã", "ã");
    return output;
}