Question

So I’m trying to parse some XML, the creation of which is not under my control. The trouble is, they’ve somehow got nodes that look like this:

<ID_INTERNAL_FEAT_FOCUSED_EXPERTISE_(MORNINGSTAR) />
<ID_INTERNAL_FEAT_FOCUSED_EXPERTISE_(QUARTERSTAFF) />
<ID_INTERNAL_FEAT_FOCUSED_EXPERTISE_(SCYTHE) />
<ID_INTERNAL_FEAT_FOCUSED_EXPERTISE_(TRATNYR) />
<ID_INTERNAL_FEAT_FOCUSED_EXPERTISE_(TRIPLE-HEADED_FLAIL) />
<ID_INTERNAL_FEAT_FOCUSED_EXPERTISE_(WARAXE) />

Visual Studio and .NET both feel that the ‘(‘ and ‘)’ characters, as used above, are totally invalid. Unfortunately, I need to process these files! Is there any way to get the Xml Reader classes to not freak out at seeing these characters, or dynamically escape them or something? I could do some sort of pre-processing on the whole file, but I DO want the ‘(‘ and ‘)’ characters if they appear inside the node in some valid way, so I don’t want to just remove them all…

Answer 1

That simply isn’t valid. Pre-processing is your best-bet, perhaps with regex – something like:

string output = Regex.Replace(input, @"(<\w+)\((\w+)\)([ >/])", "$1$2$3");

Edit: a bit more complex to replace the “-” inside the brackets:

string output = Regex.Replace(input, @"(<\w+)\(([-\w]+)\)([ >/])",
    delegate(Match match) {
        return match.Groups[1].Value + match.Groups[2].Value.Replace('-', '_')
             + match.Groups[3].Value;
    });