Question

I receive:

• ORA-31011: XML parsing failed
• ORA-19202: Error occurred in XML processing
• LPX-00230: invalid character 0 (U+0000) found in a Name or Nmtoken
• Error at line 2
• ORA-06512: at “SYS.XMLTYPE”, line 254
• ORA-06512: at line 1

When attempting to execute:

select extractValue(
  XMLType(
    replace(myxmlcolumn,CHR(0),''
    )
  ), '/xpath/to/data'
)
foo,bar,foobar
from sch.tab 

WHERE cond='cond'

“myxmlcolumn” is of course a CLOB datatype, but contains XML. This error would make sense if I wasn’t doing the replace() on the NULL. That and the error is intermittent (possibly do to the matching of my clauses). How would a null be reported when it should have been replaced before the XML cast?

10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.5.0, Toad for Oracle pro 10.6.1.3

edit:
– also tried replacing with ‘H’ to prove it wasn’t inserting a NULL back in (same error)
– also tried replace(myxmlcolumn,’\n’,” in case it didn’t like the chr(0) (same error)

Answer 1

This is not an elegant solution, and I feel a bit dirty. From @jonearles answer it looks like a known bug. The simple solution is to NOT even attempt to cast to XML. Hopefully none of the advanced xpath was needed, in my case it was not.

Select dbms_lob.substr(myxmlcolumn, 10, dbms_lob.instr(myxmlcolumn,'<data>') + 6)  

“data” was the element I was after, and it happens to always hold a value that is 10 long, and is the first and only occurrence of the element so… I got lucky.