Error when loading valid Windows-1252 document “System error: -2146697210”

Question

Somehow, sometimes the code below generates an error when loading valid Windows-1252 XML.

It fails on Windows XP Professional x86 SP3 using MSXML6.
It succeeds o

Answer 1

The behaviour depends on which version of the MSXML6.DLL you have installed.

To reproduce this better, I created another file abnormal.xml, in addition to the normal.xml from the question.

File dump abnormal.xml:

000000: 3C 3F 78 6D 6C 20 76 65  72 73 69 6F 6E 3D 22 31 ..

File abnormal.xml:

File dump normal.xml:

000000: 3C 3F 78 6D 6C 20 76 65  72 73 69 6F 6E 20 3D 20 <
000030: 52 4F 57 20 43 69 74 79  3D 22 E0 22 2F 3E 0D 0A ROW City="."/>..

File normal.xml:

The behaviour I expect is that:

1. abnormal.xml fails, because it does not specify an encoding, but contains a character with the high-bit set
2. normal.xml succeeds, as it conains a single-byte encoding supporting high-bit characters, so characters with high-bit set are allowed

These are the observed scenarios:

MSXML6 FAILURE:

reason: System error: -2146697210.
errorCode: -2146697210
url: file:///C:/My%20Dropbox/XMLEOSErrorTest/Abnormal.xml

reason: System error: -2146697210.
errorCode: -2146697210
url: file:///C:/My%20Dropbox/XMLEOSErrorTest/Normal.xml

MSXML6 SUCCESS:

reason: An invalid character was found in text content.

errorCode: -1072896760
url: file:///C:/My%20Dropbox/XMLEOSErrorTest/Abnormal.xml
srcText: