XmlDocument and iso-8859-1 Encoding

[Mogens Nielsen - Elbek & Vejrup A/S]

Hi all,
I have an application loading xml-documents. The purpose is just to load the
document and do some processing. The documents is generated by external
vendors outside my company.
Some of the vendors, however, delivers the documents encoded as iso-8859-1 -
the document root looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
....

In my application which is written in C# I use the following code to load
the document:
XmlDocument xmlInvoiceDocument = new XmlDocument();
xmlInvoiceDocument.Load(filename);

When the file is UTF-8-encoded this works perfectly, but when loading a
iso-8859-1 document it throws an XmlException with the message: "The data at
the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 44.".

Do I have any options in changing the encoding of the XmlDocument-object
before loading(I think the exception is caused by .NET not knowing the fact
that the file is iso-8859-1 encoded) ??

Does anyone have a clue ?

Thanks in advance,
Mogens Nielsen
Elbek & Vejrup A/S

[Martin Honnen]

Mogens Nielsen - Elbek & Vejrup A/S wrote:

I have an application loading xml-documents. The purpose is just to load the
document and do some processing. The documents is generated by external
vendors outside my company.
Some of the vendors, however, delivers the documents encoded as iso-8859-1 -
the document root looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
...

In my application which is written in C# I use the following code to load
the document:
XmlDocument xmlInvoiceDocument = new XmlDocument();
xmlInvoiceDocument.Load(filename);

When the file is UTF-8-encoded this works perfectly, but when loading a
iso-8859-1 document it throws an XmlException with the message: "The data at
the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 44.".

It is likely that while the XML declaration in the encoding attribute
suggests the file is iso-8859-1 encoded in reality it is not and thus
the parser gives an error as it is supposed to do.
Have you parsed that file with other XML parsers, for instance loaded it
in IE 6? Do they parse it without problems?

--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Mogens Nielsen - Elbek & Vejrup A/S]

I'm not able to load the file in IE 6 either. If I delete the
encoding-statement, however, it loads fine... Looks like you're right
regarding the file encoding. The vendor have a problem then...
Do you know a way to determine the file encoding before loading it in code?
Alternatively just a way to determine it in Windows ?

/Mogens

"Martin Honnen" wrote:

Mogens Nielsen - Elbek & Vejrup A/S wrote:

I have an application loading xml-documents. The purpose is just to load the
document and do some processing. The documents is generated by external
vendors outside my company.
Some of the vendors, however, delivers the documents encoded as iso-8859-1 -
the document root looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
...

In my application which is written in C# I use the following code to load
the document:
XmlDocument xmlInvoiceDocument = new XmlDocument();
xmlInvoiceDocument.Load(filename);

When the file is UTF-8-encoded this works perfectly, but when loading a
iso-8859-1 document it throws an XmlException with the message: "The data at
the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 44.".

It is likely that while the XML declaration in the encoding attribute
suggests the file is iso-8859-1 encoded in reality it is not and thus
the parser gives an error as it is supposed to do.
Have you parsed that file with other XML parsers, for instance loaded it
in IE 6? Do they parse it without problems?

--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Martin Honnen]

Mogens Nielsen - Elbek & Vejrup A/S wrote:

Do you know a way to determine the file encoding before loading it in code?
Alternatively just a way to determine it in Windows ?

The XML declaration requires the encoding attribute for anything but
UTF-8 and UTF-16 as the encoding of a file can in general not be
determined or inferred by looking at the bytes. So there is no way to
determine that.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Mogens Nielsen - Elbek & Vejrup A/S]

Okay that's a pity.
Thank you very much for your answers - they are very much appreciated...

"Martin Honnen" wrote:

Mogens Nielsen - Elbek & Vejrup A/S wrote:

Do you know a way to determine the file encoding before loading it in code?
Alternatively just a way to determine it in Windows ?

The XML declaration requires the encoding attribute for anything but
UTF-8 and UTF-16 as the encoding of a file can in general not be
determined or inferred by looking at the bytes. So there is no way to
determine that.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/