Question

I’m trying to read a xml file (from facebook) into my page.
I keep getting an error. Can’t figure it out.

Dim ds As New DataSet
Dim myURL As String = "http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=68310606562&format=rss20"

ds.ReadXml(myURL)

This throws an exception:

An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 12, position 53.

Any thoughts? Thanks!

Answer 1

The contents of myURL is your URL, not an XML filename.

Try first making a request to retrieve this XML content via WebClient’s DownloadString() method or similar method

var client = new WebClient();
client.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");

var xmlData = client.DownloadString(url);