Illegal XML Characters

Getting Started
#1

I have the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <recs> <rec> <fld>James</fld> <fld>Smith</fld> <fld>Smith & Company</fld> </rec> </recs>

This fails when I use LoadXML into an XMLDocument. But if I remove that one ampersand in third fld, it works fine. Are there any other characters that are not valid in values?

#2

This may be of help.

#3

Like HTML, XML codes certain characters as HTML entities.

“&” should be entered as

&amp;

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references

#4

Where did the original XML come from that it was improperly encoded?

#5

Thank you everyone! It’s coming from a FileMaker database as tab delimited data that I “converted” to xml. It looks like I need to deal with the following based on Michel’s wikipedia link.

"
&
'
<

I’m really surprised that it doesn’t just respect anything within the tags.

Can I just wrap everything within the tags with CDATA?

#6

Can you export the FileMaker data as XML to begin with? (They implement their own format.) Otherwise, how are you doing the converting?

I’m trying to see if there is a better way for you to be doing whatever you’re doing.

#7

Since you know it’s not “real” xml, a few ReplaceAll commands before you LoadXML should do you.

Edit: Except for the < and > symbols, of course. Nvm, this may not be the best solution.

#8

I wish. I’m building an SQL statement in Xojo and sending that over to FileMaker which then returns the data, but it’s basically tab delimited text.

I decided to embrace the format right than fight it by using NthField. I just got everything working and it’s perfect. I thought it’d be better to use XMLDocument, but that required massaging the data. Using NthField resulted in no massaging. :slight_smile:

Thanks again for everyone’s help!

#9

Use Split into an array rather than NthField, unless you’re a fan of slow code. :slight_smile:

#10