Question

I am trying to load something which claims to be an XML document into any type of .net XML object: XElement, XmlDocument, or XmlTextReader. All of them throw an exception :

Name cannot begin with the ‘0’ character, hexadecimal value 0x30

The error related to a bit of ‘XML’

<chart_value 
    color="ff4400" 
    alpha="100" 
    size="12" 
    position="cursor" 
    decimal_char="." 
    0="" 
/>

I believe the problem is the author should not have named an attribute as 0.

If I could change this I would, but I do not have control of this feed. I suppose those who use it are using more permissive tools. Is there anyway I can load this as XML without throwing an error?

There is no XML declaration either, nor namespace or contract definition. I was thinking I might have to turn it into a string and do a replace, but this is not very elegant. Was wondering if there was any other options.

Answer 1

As many have said, this is not XML.

Having said that, it’s almost XML and WANTS to be XML, so I don’t think you should use a regex to screw around inside of it (here’s why).

Wherever you’re getting the stream, dump into into a string, change 0= to something like zero= and try parsing it.

Don’t forget to reverse the operation if you have to return-to-sender.

---

If you’re reading from a file, you can do something like this:

        var txt = File.ReadAllText(@"\path\to\wannabe.xml");
        var clean = txt.Replace("0=", "zero=");
        var doc = new XmlDocument();
        doc.LoadXml(clean);

This is not guaranteed to remove all potential XML problems — but it should remove the one you have.