Invalid Character in the given encoding

mswin · November 28th, 2008, 04:17 AM

Hi,

I am using XSLT to process an XML document.
In my xslt code I have the following line of code, for which I am getting the error as "Invalid Character in the given encoding".

<xsl:value-of select="Ã"/>

XSl Output tag in my xslt:
<xsl:output method="html" />

Anything Wrong with this?

Thanks in Advance for any suggetsions.

-mswin

mhkay · November 28th, 2008, 04:51 AM

From the error message as given, it's not clear whether the problem is with the source document, the stylesheet, or the output document. Are there no other clues? (If not, another XSLT processor might give better diagnostics...).

My first guess would be that the problem is with the stylesheet itself, that you have edited it using an editor whose default encoding is iso 8859-1 but you haven't added an XML declaration at the start of the stylesheet to say so. See what happens if you add <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

mswin · November 28th, 2008, 05:44 AM

Hi,

Here are the xml and xslt that I am using:
XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<company>
  <name>XYZ Inc.</name>
  <address1>One Abc Way</address1>
  <address2>Some avenue</address2>
  <city>Tech city</city>
  <country>Neverland</country>
  </company>

XSLT:



<xsl:stylesheet
      xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
      version="1.0">

<xsl:output method="html" />

    
    <xsl:template match="/">

        <html>

            <head>

                <title>Welcome to <xsl:value-of select="/company/name"/></title>

                <style>
                    body,td {font-family:Tahoma,Arial; font-size:9pt;}
                </style>

            </head>

            <body>
                <h2>Welcome to <xsl:value-of select="/company/name"/></h2>
                <p/>
                <b>Our contact details:</b>
                <br/>
                <br/>
                <xsl:value-of select="/company/name"/>
                <br/>
                <xsl:value-of select="/company/address1"/>
                <br/>
                <xsl:value-of select="/company/address2"/>
                <br/>
                <xsl:value-of select="/company/city"/>
                <br/>
                <xsl:value-of select="/company/country"/>
                <br/>
                <xsl:value-of select="Ã"/>

            </body>

        </html>

    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

I am using XSLTCompiledTransform in C#, and writing result to html file.

Even I added encoding to the xml file it doesn't work. Still I get the same error.

Many thanks for further help on this.

samjudson · November 28th, 2008, 06:01 AM

Michael was suggesting adding the XML declaration to the XSLT file.

Without that declaration the XML file is NOT well-formed if the file is assumed to be UTF-8 (I cut and pasted it into Notepad++ and used its XML syntax checker and it told me straight away that that line had an invalid character).

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/