Parsing xml string to an xml document fails if the string begins with <?xml… ?> section

Question

I have an XML file begining like this:

Answer 1

Do you have a byte-order-mark (BOM) at the beginning of your XML, and does it match your encoding ? If you chop out your header, you'll also chop out the BOM and if that is incorrect, then subsequent parsing may work.

You may need to inspect your document at the byte level to see the BOM.