Get XML from a string

Question

I have a Socket communication in my Windows Phone app, but when I call it I can sometimes get a result, that looks like this

\0\0\0\0<RESULT><DATA>...</DATA></RESULT>\0

I want to remove the start and the end of it so I only get the XML, but what is the best way to do it? I have thought about Regex, but I can not make it work :(

What are you talking to? It sounds like quite possibly you've got the protocol slightly wrong. — Jon Skeet, Aug 08 '12 at 10:01
You could use `string xml = ReturnString.Trim('\0');` I guess. — yogi, Aug 08 '12 at 10:03
@NikhilAgrawal I have tried many things, but right now I am trying with 2 regexes, where they are almost equal and looks like this Regex.Replace(DataFromServer, "^.*?<", "<"); — The87Boy, Aug 08 '12 at 10:03
@JonSkeet The communication is working right, after I added header and the end-byte to the message — The87Boy, Aug 08 '12 at 10:04
@yogi That is tried, but I do not work in the start, as there is some other letters, I can not copy-paste here (I do not know why, but Visual Studio shows them as question marks) — The87Boy, Aug 08 '12 at 10:06
Are you somehow misinterpreting a byte-order-mark (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1772321/what-is-xml-bom-and-how-do-i-detect-it) ? — Brian Agnew, Aug 08 '12 at 10:06
@yogi My Socket looks like this new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp); — The87Boy, Aug 08 '12 at 10:07
[This early question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5501284/how-do-i-remove-all-characters-in-a-string-until-a-substring-is-matched-in-ruby) might be useful. — Jaime Oro, Aug 08 '12 at 10:17
@The87Boy: If you're garbage at the start and end of the message, I don't think you *do* have the communication working correctly. Please add more information in your question. — Jon Skeet, Aug 08 '12 at 11:01
@JonSkeet I found out of that my client was receiving the reciept, then the total amount of bytes, then the body and at the end a end-byte, so it was integrated correct, but I could not figure out the reciept — The87Boy, Sep 01 '12 at 12:57

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 08 '12 at 10:07

1

It sounds like a problem with your protocol, but to remove the \0 characters you could do a simple trimming of the string.

If your string has the actual \ and 0 characters in it then you could do the following:

var fixedData = receivedData.Trim(new[] { '\\', '0' });

And if the string starts with null characters (encoded as \0) then you could to:

var fixedData = receivedData.Trim(new[] { '\0' });

Both examples assume that the variable receviedData is a String containing your data.

answered Aug 08 '12 at 10:07

Rune Grimstad

35,612
10
61
76

This does not remove all the characters :( – The87Boy Aug 08 '12 at 10:26
If you have more characters than the ones in your example code then you must add them as well in the call to .Trim. – Rune Grimstad Aug 08 '12 at 10:27

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 08 '12 at 10:08

I have not enough information to answer you correctly, so I will suggest the following :

You should try to map the data you are receiving from your socket to a serializable class. And then you serialize the classObject to an XML document.

public class socketDataToMap
{
    public string Data {get; set;}
}

and then

var ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(socketDataToMap));
using (var reader = XmlReader.Create(yourSocketStream))
            {
                var deserializedObject = ser.Deserialize(reader) as socketDataToMap;

            }

and then you serialize to an XML file. I see something like this for your problem.

I can not make this work, as Windows Phone only support asyncrhonous socket-communication — The87Boy, Aug 08 '12 at 10:25

Ria · Answer 3 · 2012-08-08T11:02:41.047

If your result have to be XML and more characters(else \0) can be in start or end of your string, these code can be useful:

var start = inputString.IndexOf('<');
var end = inputString.LastIndexOf('>');
var result = inputString.Substring(start, end - start);

String.IndexOf Method (Char): Reports the zero-based index of the first occurrence of the specified Unicode character in this string.
String.LastIndexOf Method (Char): Reports the zero-based index position of the last occurrence of a specified Unicode character within this instance.
String.Substring Method (Int32, Int32): Retrieves a substring from this instance. The substring starts at a specified character position and has a specified length.

Get XML from a string

3 Answers3