XMLin with strings containing invalid xml characters

Question

I am using XML::Simple in one of my perl scripts to extract some messages, problem is I am getting this error :

No semi-colon found after entity name [Ln: 1, Col: 151]

when I use XMLin( $msg ) and $msg contains an invalid character like '&'

I know I can use regex to remove them, but I don't want to. I can use replace & with &.

Is there a simple way in perl to deal with this kind of invalid characters in strings when I use XMLin( $msg ) ?

Example for $msg can be like : <Error>Exception Invalid address (&F5F5F5F5)</Error>

If you post an example `$msg`, we can probably give you an answer on parsing it. `XML::Simple` is not the answer. Trying to hand off broken XML to a parser is also not a good plan. — Sobrique, Mar 17 '16 at 15:44
Well, that's never going to work - it's not XML in the first place, so how do you expect to parse it as XML? — Sobrique, Mar 17 '16 at 15:45

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 17 '16 at 15:07

2

No.

XML::Simple doesn't actually parse XML. It uses one of many other parsers to do so. If it had such an option, it wouldn't always work, if ever.

XML::Simple, therefore, doesn't provide such an option.

answered Mar 17 '16 at 15:07

ikegami

Thanks. I think what is the root cause in my case is : I am getting this string from a java program where it parses another xml. There it was calling node.getTextContent() and that call is not preserving the character `&` it is converting it into `&` and giving me the string. Later when I feed it to XMLin it fails. How to get the text as it is from the node ? Do you have any idea? – SomeDude Mar 17 '16 at 15:11
@svasa you should ask a new question in the _java_ tag and ask there, but make sure to be specific. – simbabque Mar 17 '16 at 16:59
That's not the root cause. `getTextContent` is behaving correctly. It resolves entities because the caller shouldn't have to care about how it the text was encoded. Why are you passing the text of an XML node to `XMLin`? Do you (weirdly) have XML embedded in your XML? If so, the original should look like `<Error>...(&F5F5F5F5)&</Error>` instead of `<Error>...(&F5F5F5F5)&</Error>`. – ikegami Mar 17 '16 at 17:14

1 Answers1