My XML Feed Choked

[Malcolm Dew-Jones]

Joe Cox ([email protected]) wrote:
: I am relatively new to XML. I built a website using XML to transfer query
: results to web browsers. Everything was working and I was doing final
: testing before deploying it, but ran into an XML problem.

: I got the following error:


: Whitespace is not allowed at this location. Error processing resource
: 'http://compass/cgi-bin/keyword_search.php'. Line 15...

: <name>CO & CO</name>
: ------------^


: 'CO & CO' is a string that represents the name of a company that was fed out
: of the database as part of a query result. My PHP code builds it into XML

(not quite)

: Apparently, XML doesn't like to see an '&' between it's tags. I though XML
: ignored everything between tags, so why does it snag on this?

No. Various things must be escaped, most obviously > by using &gt;

"&" itself must therefore also be escaped, by using &amp;

(To ensure no misunderstanding, the above escapes, with each character
quoted)

"&" "g" "t" ";"

"&" "a" "m" "p" ";"


Is there a
: simple fix to this or must I go back and write exception code to handle
: these?

When you generate the XML you must escape various things. I'm sure there
are XML libraries for PHP that make it easy to generate valid XML from
arbitrary input, but I don't know any names off hand.

 

[Joe Cox]

I am relatively new to XML. I built a website using XML to transfer query
results to web browsers. Everything was working and I was doing final
testing before deploying it, but ran into an XML problem.

I got the following error:


Whitespace is not allowed at this location. Error processing resource
'http://compass/cgi-bin/keyword_search.php'. Line 15...

<name>CO & CO</name>
------------^


'CO & CO' is a string that represents the name of a company that was fed out
of the database as part of a query result. My PHP code builds it into XML
Apparently, XML doesn't like to see an '&' between it's tags. I though XML
ignored everything between tags, so why does it snag on this? Is there a
simple fix to this or must I go back and write exception code to handle
these?

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

 

[Johannes Koch]

<name>CO & CO</name>
------------^

& -> &amp;

 

[Joe Cox]

Thanks. I was able to repair it with a few regex-replace statements.