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I have a xml that says it's encoding is UTF-8. When I use openxml to import data into sql, I always get "XML parsing: line xxxxxx, character xx, illegal xml character.

Right now I can go to each line and replace it with the a legal character and it goes well. Sometimes there maybe be more than 5 mac roman characters and it becomes tedious to replace. I am currently using notepad ++ and there is probably a way for this.

Can anyone suggest if anything can be done in sql level or does it have to checked before ran in sql?

So far, most of the characters found are, x95, x92, x96, xbc, xbd, xbo.

Thanks.

eripey
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  • So I removed "" and sql loads the xml just fine. I read this on a msdn sql forum post. Can anyone comment on this? – eripey Sep 23 '13 at 23:05

1 Answers1

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In your question, you did not specify whether illegal characters you had to remove were Unicode or not. Or whether the file was really expected to contain UTF-8 characters. Unlike for the ASCII, for UTF-8 some byte combinations are illegal, so if you declare the text file to be encoded in UTF-8, you might not be able to read it successfully till end (such a thing could never happen with ASCII).

So it is possible that by removal of <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> you just declared some non-unicode encoding of your file (instead of previously declared UTF-8), so reading the data passed. You did not have many foreign characters like ľťčý in the file, did you? Normally, it is a must that you check what happened to those after the import. It might happen that your import passes without error, but city name Čadca becomes äadca and somebody will thank your company for rendering his address unreadable.

miroxlav
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