How do you remove invalid hexadecimal characters from an XML-based data source prior to constructing
- by Oppositional
Is there any easy/general way to clean an XML based data source prior to using it in an XmlReader so that I can gracefully consume XML data that is non-conformant to the hexadecimal character restrictions placed on XML?
Note:
The solution needs to handle XML
data sources that use character
encodings other than UTF-8, e.g. by
specifying the character encoding at
the XML document declaration. Not
mangling the character encoding of
the source while stripping invalid
hexadecimal characters has been a
major sticking point.
The removal of invalid hexadecimal characters should only remove hexadecimal encoded values, as you can often find href values in data that happens to contains a string that would be a string match for a hexadecimal character.
Background:
I need to consume an XML-based data source that conforms to a specific format (think Atom or RSS feeds), but want to be able to consume data sources that have been published which contain invalid hexadecimal characters per the XML specification.
In .NET if you have a Stream that represents the XML data source, and then attempt to parse it using an XmlReader and/or XPathDocument, an exception is raised due to the inclusion of invalid hexadecimal characters in the XML data. My current attempt to resolve this issue is to parse the Stream as a string and use a regular expression to remove and/or replace the invalid hexadecimal characters, but I am looking for a more performant solution.
