It is pretty common to come across a scenario where we have to deal with special characters in XML. Like &, (, ), $, etc. With this fix the < be the only illeagal character.
Let’s take look at one way of fixing it if one does not have any control over the XML being received
| string xmlString = "<?xml version=\'1.0\' encoding=\'UTF-8\' standalone=\'yes\'?>\n<rows xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\" xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" xmlns:x=\"urn:row\">\n<xsd:schema targetNamespace=\"urn:row\">\n<xsd:element name=\"row\">\n<xsd:complexType>\n<xsd:sequence>\n<xsd:element name=\"customer_name\" type=\"xsd:string\" nillable=\"true\"/>\n</xsd:sequence>\n</xsd:complexType>\n</xsd:element>\n</xsd:schema>\n<x:row>\n<customer_name>A&B Company</customer_name>\n</x:row>\n</rows>"; | |
| // xmlString.Dump(); // LINQ Pad | |
| // var doc = XElement.Parse(xmlString); // Error! | |
| string pattern = "(?<start>>)(?<content>.+?(?<!>))(?<end><)|(?<start>\")(?<content>.+?)(?<end>\")"; | |
| string result = Regex.Replace(xmlString, pattern, m => | |
| m.Groups["start"].Value + | |
| HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(m.Groups["content"].Value)) + | |
| m.Groups["end"].Value); | |
| // result.Dump(); // LINQ Pad | |
| var doc = XElement.Parse(result); |
So if one were to execute line 4, following XmlException would be thrown:
