Is There anyway to remove Ampersand prior to XmlDocument Load?

Question

Here is my Code?

  XmlDocument rssXmlDoc = new XmlDocument();

           // Load the RSS file from the RSS URL
           rssXmlDoc.Load("https://polsky.uchicago.edu/events/feed/");


                var nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(rssXmlDoc.NameTable);
                nsmgr.AddNamespace("event", "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL;Transform");

            // Parse the Items in the RSS file
            XmlNodeList rssNodes = rssXmlDoc.SelectNodes("rss/channel/item", nsmgr);

I know that the XML has some elements that contain "&", and I also know that it is really not up to me to fix this bad RSS feed; however, I am not certain if they will comply. Is there anything I can do?

The following exception is thrown:

An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 138, position 26.

Can you give an example of where these ampersands are located? Inside the tags, or in the value elements? — Ron Beyer, Sep 05 '18 at 19:53
Load the file into a string, clean string, load xml string https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4929653/xmldocument-load-from-string — UnhandledExcepSean, Sep 05 '18 at 19:55
I feel like I could scrub the XML if I can somehow get the XML into a string, but I cam not certain how to load the XML into a string. Any Ideas? — Paul T. Rykiel, Sep 05 '18 at 20:08

Terry Carmen · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-05T20:03:40.770

2

You can't fix that with an XML parser because it's invalid XML. & isn't allowed without being escaped.

You can however read in the bad XML as a string, do a string replace of & for &, then process the string with your normal XML parser.

You can also bracket it in CDATA and get on with your life 8-)

PS. If you go with the first method, be sure to check for and handle the other "bad" characters like <>"' (less than, greater than, double quote, single quote)

edited Sep 05 '18 at 20:03

answered Sep 05 '18 at 19:58

Terry Carmen

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Thank you so much, i am already working with the provider to fix the issue. – Paul T. Rykiel Sep 05 '18 at 20:14
1

That's even better since it's broken for everybody, not just for you. They really shouldn't be sending out invalid XML. – Terry Carmen Sep 05 '18 at 20:20

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 05 '18 at 19:58

I use System.Security.SecurityElement.Escape() to take care of "XML encoding" requirements. It works essentially the same as the System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode Encode/decode

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.security.securityelement.escape

Is There anyway to remove Ampersand prior to XmlDocument Load?

2 Answers2