xml.LoadData - Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1

Question

I'm trying to parse some XML inside a WiX installer. The XML would be an object of all my errors returned from a web server. I'm getting the error in the question title with this code:

XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
try
{
    xml.LoadXml(myString);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    System.IO.File.WriteAllText(@"C:\text.txt", myString + "\r\n\r\n" + ex.Message);
    throw ex;
}

myString is this (as seen in the output of text.txt)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Errors></Errors>

text.txt comes out looking like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Errors></Errors>

Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.

I need this XML to parse so I can see if I had any errors.

Answer 1

The hidden character is probably BOM. The explanation to the problem and the solution can be found here, credits to James Schubert, based on an answer by James Brankin found here.

Though the previous answer does remove the hidden character, it also removes the whole first line. The more precise version would be:

string _byteOrderMarkUtf8 = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble());
if (xml.StartsWith(_byteOrderMarkUtf8))
{
    xml = xml.Remove(0, _byteOrderMarkUtf8.Length);
}

I encountered this problem when fetching an XSLT file from Azure blob and loading it into an XslCompiledTransform object. On my machine the file looked just fine, but after uploading it as a blob and fetching it back, the BOM character was added.

Answer 2

Use Load() method instead, it will solve the problem. See more

Answer 3

The issue here was that myString had that header line. Either there was some hidden character at the beginning of the first line or the line itself was causing the error. I sliced off the first line like so:

xml.LoadXml(myString.Substring(myString.IndexOf(Environment.NewLine)));

This solved my problem.

Answer 4

I Think that the problem is about encoding. That's why removing first line(with encoding byte) might solve the problem.

My solution for Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1. in XDocument.Parse(xmlString) was replacing it with XDocument.Load( new MemoryStream( xmlContentInBytes ) );

I've noticed that my xml string looked ok:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

but in different text editor encoding it looked like this:

?<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

At the end i did not need the xml string but xml byte[]. If you need to use the string you should look for "invisible" bytes in your string and play with encodings to adjust the xml content for parsing or loading.

Hope it will help

Answer 5

Save your file with different encoding:

File > Save file as... > Save as UTF-8 without signature.

In VS 2017 you find encoding as a dropdown next to Save button.

Answer 6

Main culprit for this error is logic which determines encoding when converting Stream or byte[] array to .NET string.

Using StreamReader created with 2nd constructor parameter detectEncodingFromByteOrderMarks set to true, will determine proper encoding and create string which does not break XmlDocument.LoadXml method.

public string GetXmlString(string url)
{
    using var stream = GetResponseStream(url);
    using var reader = new StreamReader(stream, true);
    return reader.ReadToEnd(); // no exception on `LoadXml`
}

Common mistake would be to just blindly use UTF8 encoding on the stream or byte[]. Code bellow would produce string that looks valid when inspected in Visual Studio debugger, or copy-pasted somewhere, but it will produce the exception when used with Load or LoadXml if file is encoded differently then UTF8 without BOM.

public string GetXmlString(string url)
{
    byte[] bytes = GetResponseByteArray(url);
    return System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes); // potentially exception on `LoadXml`
}

Answer 7

I've solved this issue by directly editing the byte array. Collect the UTF8 preamble and remove directly the header. Afterward you can transform the byte[]to a string with GetString method, see below. The \r and \t I've removed as well, just as precaution.

XmlDocument configurationXML = new XmlDocument();
List<byte> byteArray = new List<byte>(webRequest.downloadHandler.data);

foreach(byte singleByte in Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble())
{
     byteArray.RemoveAt(byteArray.IndexOf(singleByte));
}
string xml = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(byteArray.ToArray());
       xml = xml.Replace("\\r", "");
       xml = xml.Replace("\\t", "");

Answer 8

If your xml is in a string use the following to remove any byte order mark:

        xml = new Regex("\\<\\?xml.*\\?>").Replace(xml, "");

Answer 9

At first I had problems escaping the "&" character, then diacritics and special letters were shown as question marks and ended up with the issue OP mentioned.

I looked at the answers and I used @Ringo's suggestion to try Load() method as an alternative. That made me realize that I can deal with my response in other ways not just as a string.

using System.IO.Stream instead of string solved all the issues for me.

var response = await this.httpClient.GetAsync(url);
var responseStream = await response.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync();
var xmlDocument = new XmlDocument();
xmlDocument.Load(responseStream);

The cool thing about Load() is that this method automatically detects the string format of the input XML (for example, UTF-8, ANSI, and so on). See more

Answer 10

I have found out one of the solutions. For your code this could be as follows -

XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
try
{
    // assuming the location of the file is in the current directory 
    // assuming the file name be loadData.xml
    string myString = "./loadData.xml";
    xml.Load(myString);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    System.IO.File.WriteAllText(@"C:\text.txt", myString + "\r\n\r\n" + ex.Message);
    throw ex;
}

Answer 11

Using an XmlDataDocument object is much better than using an XDocument or XmlDocument object. XmlDataDocument works fine with UTF8 and it doesn't have problems with Byte Order Sequences. You can get the child nodes of each element using ChildNodes property. Use a custom function such as the following one:

        static public void ReadXmlDataDocument2(string xmlFilePath)
    {
        
        if (xmlFilePath != null)
        {
            if (File.Exists(xmlFilePath))
            {
                System.IO.FileStream fs = default(System.IO.FileStream);
                try
                {
                    fs = new System.IO.FileStream(xmlFilePath, System.IO.FileMode.Open, System.IO.FileAccess.Read);
                    System.Xml.XmlDataDocument k_XDoc = new System.Xml.XmlDataDocument();
                    k_XDoc.Load(fs);
                    fs.Close();
                    fs.Dispose();
                    fs = null;

                    XmlNodeList ndsRoot = k_XDoc.ChildNodes;
                    foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode xLog in ndsRoot)
                    {
                        foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode xLog2 in xLog.ChildNodes)
                        {
                            if (xLog2.Name == "ERRORs")
                            {
                                foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode xLog3 in xLog2.ChildNodes)
                                {
                                    if (xLog3.Name == "ErrorCode")
                                    {
                                        // Do something
                                    }
                                    if (xLog3.Name == "Description")
                                    {
                                        // Do something
                                    }
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }

                }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                    MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
                }
            }
        }
    }

Answer 12

if we are using XDocument.Parse(@""). Use @ it resolves the issue.