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Asked: 2026-05-11T10:41:58+00:00

I have the following XML that I’m running in SQL Server, and it breaks,

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I have the following XML that I’m running in SQL Server, and it breaks, why?

 declare @xml varchar(max)  declare @hDoc int   set @xml = '<transaction>  <item itemId='1' value='Hello World' />  <item itemId='2' value='Hello &World' />  <item itemId='3' value='Hello <World' />  <item itemId='4' value='Hello >World' />  <item itemId='5' value='Hello ’World' />  </transaction>'   exec sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT, @xml   select         itemId  ,      value  from      openxml(@hDoc, '/transaction/item')     with (          itemId int,          value varchar(max)      ) item
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  1. The values in the XML contain invalid characters. For XML in general you must escape the less than sign and the ampersand like so: &lt; and &amp;

     declare @xml varchar(max)  declare @hDoc int   set @xml = '<transaction>  <item itemId='1' value='Hello World' />  <item itemId='2' value='Hello &amp;World' />  <item itemId='3' value='Hello &lt;World' />  <item itemId='4' value='Hello >World' />  </transaction>'   exec sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT, @xml   select         itemId  ,      value  from      openxml(@hDoc, '/transaction/item')     with (          itemId int,          value varchar(max)      ) item

    However when using openxml certain values won’t work in general, specifically that curly apostrophe. I’m not sure what values are invalid, but I know that is one of them. So the solution is to use the native XML type in SQL Server 2005.

     declare @xml xml  set @xml = '<transaction>  <item itemId='1' value='Hello World' />  <item itemId='2' value='Hello &amp;World' />  <item itemId='3' value='Hello &lt;World' />  <item itemId='4' value='Hello >World' />  <item itemId='5' value='Hello ’World' />  </transaction>'   select        item.value('@itemId', 'int')      , item.value('@value', 'varchar(max)')  from @xml.nodes('/transaction/item') [transaction](item)
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