Re: [xsl] Mysterious 'invalid character'

Subject: Re: [xsl] Mysterious 'invalid character'
From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 13:27:38 -0500
[Ingo Mittendorf]

> My file is well-formed and valid against the DTD when I check it (within
> XMLSpy). No error message there.
>
> And unfortunately the invalid character is invisible, which is my problem.
I
> simply can't find it. What am I supposed to look for? As I was saying in
my
> first posting, when I once had the problem before, it apparently had
> something to do with the line-feed/carriage-return. I have been trying to
> find something on it, without success. So, I do need to know where to
start.
>

Try using a command-line parser on both the xml and xslt files, such as rxp.
With rxp you can validate against the DTD with the -V switch.  It might pick
up something that Spy doesn't, or it might give you useful messages.  Then
try to transform it outside of Spy, using something like Saxon to do the
transformation.

Using the command line approach will prevent any extra encoding changes that
may happen within a complex program like msxml or Spy, so you will have the
best change of discovering what is going on.

I have sometimes had this kind of problem, always when I started by copying
and pasting someone else's markup.  I seem to remember the most common
problem has been unwanted 0xA0 characters, which aren't legal in some
encodings.

I have had success in getting rid of such characters in the source file
using an editor like Edit Plus (by "like", I mean that it is flexible and
doesn't seem to change encoded characters even if it doesn't display them
right -a Windows thing having to do with the "codepage", I guess), marking
the invisible character, and pasting it into the search-and-replace dialog
to do a global replace.  I'm not clear whether that will turn out to be
useful for your case or not.

Cheers,

Tom P


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


Current Thread