Question

I keep getting this error randomly when trying to read ARSTECHNICA RSS feed. I get the following error:

System.Xml.XmlException: ”, hexadecimal value 0x10, is an invalid
character. Line 96, position 1129.

I know that it is because of invalid charatercs in XML and it needs to be removed. I did look at this for removing invalid charaters.

    XmlReader readXML;
    readXML = XmlReader.Create(URL);
    SyndicationFeed News= SyndicationFeed.Load(readXML);
    readXML.Close();
    return News;

I ‘m not sure how to remove the invalid characters from the RSS feed. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Answer 1

You could try to load the rss feed as a string, remove the invalid characters and load as a news feed. Hope that helps:

HttpWebRequest httpWebRequest =  
(HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index");
HttpWebResponse httpWebesponse = (HttpWebResponse)httpWebRequest.GetResponse();

Stream dataStream = httpWebesponse.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader streamreader = new StreamReader(dataStream, Encoding.UTF8);
 string response = streamreader.ReadToEnd();
streamreader.Close();

response = response.Replace((char)0x10, ' ');

XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(new System.IO.StringReader(response));
reader.Read();

SyndicationFeed News = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);