Special characters with XDocument

Question

I\'m trying to read a file (not a XML, but the structure is similar), but i\'m getting this Exception:

\'┴\', hexadecimal value 0x15, is an invalid character. Li         


        

Answer 1

This XML is pretty bad;

1. You have <Segment>0000016125 in there which, while not technically illegal (it is a Text node), is just kind of odd.
2. Your <Control> element contains invalid characters without an XML CDATA section

You can manually normalize the XML or do it in C# via string manipulation, or RegEx, or something similar.

In your simple example, only the <Control> element has invalid characters; therefore it is relatively simple to fix it and add a CDATA section using the string.Replace() method, to make it look like this:

<Control><![CDATA[0003┴300000┴English(U.S.)PORTUGUESE┴┴bla.000┴webgui\messages\xsl\en\blabla\blabla.xlf]]></Control>

Then you can load the good XML into your XDocument using XDocument.Parse(string xml):

string badXml = @"
    <temproot>
        <Codepage>UTF16</Codepage>
        <Segment>0000016125
            <Control>0003┴300000┴English(U.S.)PORTUGUESE┴┴bla.000┴webgui\messages\xsl\en\blabla\blabla.xlf</Control>
            <Source>To blablablah the   firewall to blablablah local IP address.    </Source>
            <Target>Para blablablah a uma blablablah local específico.  </Target>
        </Segment>
    </temproot>";

// assuming only <control> element has the invalid characters
string goodXml = badXml
    .Replace("<Control>", "<Control><![CDATA[")
    .Replace("</Control>", "]]></Control>");

XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Parse(goodXml);
xDoc.Declaration = new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-16", "yes");

// do stuff with xDoc