Question

I have an XML document that’s being generated from some content that people are copy/pasting from all sorts of places (Word documents mostly though).

It looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
    <data> <![CDATA[
         (whatever was pasted)
    ]]></data>        
</response>

I’ve always used an encoding of UTF-8 or iso-8859-1, but now someone’s gone and copy/pasted the unicode character U+001A (0x1a) and I can’t find an encoding that will accept it. Everything I put the XML file into (e.g. Firefox, Internet Explorer, XML Spy) all say it’s invalid, regardless of the kind of encoding used.

Is there an encoding I can use that will stop the file from falling over, or do I need to start stripping all these characters out one by one?

Answer 1

U+001A is not a valid character in an XML document. The valid range of characters according to the specification is:

Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF] /* any Unicode character, excluding the surrogate blocks, FFFE, and FFFF. */