Question

I have some data (produced by a legacy application) that I know is invalid XML, for example:

<document>
  <dossier>
    <answers>
      <answer>Ref=some <text> here</answer>
    </answers>
  </dossier>
</document>

I want to load this into an XmlDocument, and it’s currently failing because it’s treating “<text>” as a tag. Please note that this is just an example. The general problem is that answers can contain unescaped angle brackets in any order with different characters in between.

What options do I have?

Answer 1

You can use Regex for example and escape the content inside <answer> </answer> before parsing it with XmlDocument.

Match with something like <answer>(.+?)</answer> and replace the captured group with the escaped version.