Question

Getting the following thrown error when calling a web service. Have googled without any results other then people asking the same question.

Server was unable to process request. ---> The surrogate pair (0xD860, 0x27) is invalid. A high surrogate character (0xD800 - 0xDBFF) must always be paired with a low surrogate character (0xDC00 - 0xDFFF)."} 
System.Exception {System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException

The web service returns a series of simple text fields from a view by running the view and opening a dataset and reading in the data and returning it as formatted XML.

EDIT

Was able to resolve this using the following regex which strips out the bad characters which happened to be MSWord/Excel characters

string re = @"[^\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\xD7FF\xE000-\xFFFD\x10000-x10FFFF]";
return Regex.Replace(text, re, string.Empty);

Answer 1

What might be happening is that:

• The XML file contains the bytes ED A1 A0 27. According to chardet, this was most likely intended to be эба' encoded in IBM866.
• But it lacks an encoding declaration, so the parser assumes that it’s UTF-8.
• The text gets decoded into the UTF-16 string D860 0027.
• This string is not valid UTF-16 because of the unpaired surrogate D860, so you get the exception.