Team,

I've got a problem parsing special characters in XML. I was given a really badly formatted XML file that has a bunch of special characters - majority of these look like "squares" in notepad.

I've already tried a bunch of different thing like setting the Encoding type to "UTF-8" and also inserting the "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>" line as the first line in the document.

To set the encoding programmatically I did this by setting the StreamReader's property for encoding to UTF-8. Then, I use this to write XML data a file that I later load using the .Load() function. But this is where it tanks. It says - unrecognized character found which is the square like character. I can delete this character if I want - this is totally upto me. But how do I do this? How do I recognize that the character read in the stream was the square looking character and then delete?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

I had this problem.  It made the formatting really bad if the items with those special characters are printed.  It would help some if you knew exactly what the special character was.

Here is code I used to determine what the special character was in position 4, of textbox2

Then I found a function called Regex.Replace to find and clean out the bad characters.
See Book: Visual Basic.Net Text Manipulation Handbook by Francois Liger, Craig McQueen, Paul Wilton

http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-NET-Manipulation-Handbook/dp/1861007302/ref=sr_1_1/105-6128760-9736442?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193259222&sr=1-1

Try this to clean data user enters in textbox2 before saving to the database.

        TextBox2.Text = Regex.Replace(TextBox2.Text, Chr(9), "")                   'TAB
        TextBox2.Text = Regex.Replace(TextBox2.Text, Chr(10), "")                  'LF
        TextBox2.Text = Regex.Replace(TextBox2.Text, Chr(11), "")                  'VT
        TextBox2.Text = Regex.Replace(TextBox2.Text, Chr(12), "")                  'FF
        TextBox2.Text = Regex.Replace(TextBox2.Text, Chr(13), "")                  'CR

-smcirish

smcrish thanks for the posts - this is great, I'm going to try this tonight and leave a feedback on this asap. Thanks again.

Hi mobfigr,

As far as I know, this is encoding issue. If you set encoding='utf-8' , please check whether you save this xml file as utf-8 encode or not. They must be same.