Question

How do I escape an ampersand in the Read XML activity?

Workflow

Updated June 15, 2016

asked on June 14, 2016

I'm trying to use the Read XML activity to parse the following XML:

<Report Entity="Thing 1 & Thing 2" Name="Event Code Report">
   <Parameters>
       <Parameter Name="StartDate" Value="5/1/2012" />
       <Parameter Name="EndDate" Value="5/31/2012" />
       <Parameter Name="Fund" Value="[null]" />
       <Parameter Name="ReportList" Value="Thing 1 & Thing 2" />
       <Parameter Name="EventCode" Value="ISSUED" />
   </Parameters>
</Report>

I create XPath Expression tokens, like //Parameter[@Name='ReportList']/@Value, but it doesn't like the ampersand and gives a warning of:

The value of the XML Source property is invalid. An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 8, position 53.

I tried adding the Encode XML function to the XML Source for the activity, and that gives a different error:

The value of the XML Source property is invalid. Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.

Other xml files that I parse, not containing an ampersand, create the tokens properly and without error.

Is there a way I can handle this poorly formatted XML documents and extract the value successfully?

0 0

Answer

SELECTED ANSWER

replied on June 15, 2016

The results file is not a token we can run substitution on.

Your only option would be to write a script to download the e-doc yourself, run the replacement and generate a token you can feed to Read XML.

Be aware that & is allowed in XML as part of escaping of other reserved characters, including ampersand itself, so you would have to do something more than just replace all ampersands with &

1 0

Replies

replied on June 14, 2016

The unescaped ampersand in the text means that it does not represent a legal XML document and the parser is correct to reject it as input. Ideally, you could change the process that produces this output to escape "&" as "&". If that's not possible you could try doing a string replace prior to processing it as XML. This is tricky to do if some entities are correctly escaped and only some are problematic.

1 0

View 1 previous reply

replied on June 15, 2016

What are you using as the source file in Read XML?

0 0

replied on June 15, 2016 • Show version history

I have the Download XML task pointed at an entry in the repository.

Then the Read XML activity is using %(DownloadXML_Result File)

0 0

SELECTED ANSWER

replied on June 15, 2016

The results file is not a token we can run substitution on.

Your only option would be to write a script to download the e-doc yourself, run the replacement and generate a token you can feed to Read XML.

Be aware that & is allowed in XML as part of escaping of other reserved characters, including ampersand itself, so you would have to do something more than just replace all ampersands with &

1 0

You are not allowed to follow up in this post.

Question

Question

How do I escape an ampersand in the Read XML activity?

Answer

Replies

Sign in to reply to this post.