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RE: The most common syntax errors people make when creating XM

• From: <list.mu@c-moria.com>
• To: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Mon, 16 May 2022 21:49:04 +0200

The one I see most often from customers that generate "XML" from scripting
code that is not XML aware,
exporting XML from databases or text files...
are encoding errors
- not adding an XML declaration while the source is not UTF-8 (often
WIN-1252 eg.)
- merging different encodings into a single XML document without doing
encoding conversion
- faulty export mechanisms from databases or triple stores

Sometimes those cause a parsing error, often only in one out of a few
thousands of files
Hard to remediate, hard too spot 
And often it causes issues further up the chain but don't trigger any
parsing errors at the origin

Best regards,
Geert

-----Original Message-----
From: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> 
Sent: Monday, 16 May 2022 00:16
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject:  The most common syntax errors people make when creating
XML documents?

Hi Folks,

I am creating (for fun) an XML parser. I'd like my parser to detect and fix
the most common syntax errors in XML documents. 

I created a list of errors that I commonly make. See below. What errors do
you find yourself commonly making? I would appreciate it if you would add to
the list.  

Common syntax errors in XML documents:

1. Two quotes at the end of a namespace declaration. Example:

xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions""

2. End tag repeated. Example:

</xsl:stylesheet>


</xsl:stylesheet>

3. Missing space after attribute value delimiter. Example:

<Document id="ab3"reviewer="John Doe">

4. Incorrect syntax for start of a CDATA section. Example:

<[CDATA[            it should be <![CDATA[

5. Incorrect syntax for the end of a CDATA section. Example:

]>                          it should be ]]>

6. Missing slash in end tag. Example:

<Author>John Doe<Author>

7. Missing question mark at end of XML declaration. Example:

<?xml version="1.0">

8. Unescaped ampersand. Example:

<Publisher>Harper & Row</Publisher>

9. Missing semicolon at end of entity. Example:

<Publisher>Harper &amp Row</Publisher>

10. Space in tag name. Example:

<New York>

What else?

/Roger

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• References:
  • The most common syntax errors people make when creating XMLdocuments?
    • From: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>