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POHow to stop .net Xml Serialisation inserting illegal characters
 

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    <p>Anything below 0x20 (except for 0x09, 0x0a, 0x0d i.e. tab, carrige return and line feed) cannot be included in an XML document.</p> <p>I have some data coming out of a Database and being passed as a response to a Web Service request.</p> <p>The Soap formatter happily encodes 0x12 character (Ascii 18, Device Control 2) as <code>&amp;#12;</code> but the response fails on the client with <strong>hexadecimal value 0x12, is an invalid character</strong></p> <p><code>&lt;rant&gt;</code> What I find <em>quite</em> frustrating is these are two sides of the same coin, both client and service are .net apps. Why will the soap formatter write bad xml if nothing can read it?<code>&lt;/rant&gt;</code></p> <p>I'd like to either </p> <ol> <li>Get the Xml Serialiser to handle these odd characters correctly or</li> <li>Have the request fail in the Web Service</li> </ol> <p>I've googled and couldn't find much on this other than, a) "sanitise your Inputs" or b) "change your document structure". </p> <p>a) Isn't a runner as some of this data is +20 years old<br> b) isn't much of an option either, as other than our own front end, we have clients that code against the Web Service directly.</p> <p>Is there something obvious I'm missing? Or is it simply a case of code around AscII control codes?</p> <p>Thanks</p> <p><strong>Update</strong><br> This is actually a problem with the XmlSerialiser, the following code will serialise an invalid character to the stream, but will not de-serialise it</p> <pre><code>[Serializable] public class MyData { public string Text { get; set; } } class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { var myData = new MyData {Text = "hello " + ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString(new byte[] { 0x12 }) + " world"}; var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyData)); var xmlWriter = new StringWriter(); serializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, myData); var xmlReader = new StringReader(xmlWriter.ToString()); var newData = (MyData)serializer.Deserialize(xmlReader); // Exception // hexadecimal value 0x12, is an invalid character. } } </code></pre> <p>I can get it to choke <strong>writing</strong> the xml by explicitly creating an XmlWriter and passing that to <code>Serialise</code> (I'll post that shortly as my own answer), but that still means I've to sanatize my data before sending it.<br> As these characters are significant I can't just strip them, I need to encode them before transmission and decode them when read, and I'm <em>really</em> quite surprised that there doesn't appear to be an existing framework method to do this.</p>
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    1. COWhy are you using the Soap Formatter? What exactly are you doing?
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    2. COCan you provide us a short and complete code sample that demonstrates the issue?
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    3. CO@John: This is an existing Web Service I've inherited (the service it's self has been around for 6 or 7 years), and as we've existing clients calling into (some from Java platforms) it I can't just switch it to not use SOAP (not that I've any idea how to do that, sorry)
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