Reputation: 31

XML not well formed error

I have a php script that writes xml data to a file and another one that sends the contents of this file to the client as the response. But on the client side,im getting the following error: XML Parsing Error: not well-formed When i view source of the page, the XML i see is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<books><date>December 24th, 2009</date><total>2</total><book><name>Book 1</name><url>http://www.mydomain.com/posters/68370/img.jpg</url></book><book><name>Book 2</name><url>http://www.anotherdomain.com/posters/76198/img1.jpg</url></book></books>

In file1.php i have the following code that writes the XML to a file :

$file= fopen("book_results.xml", "w");
$xml_writer = new XMLWriter();
$xml_writer->openMemory();
$xml_writer->startDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8', 'yes');
$xml_writer->startElement('books');
$xml_writer->writeElement('date',get_current_date());   // Like December 23rd, 2009
$xml_writer->writeElement('total',$totalResults);   
foreach($bookList as $key => $value) { /* $bookList contains key value pairs */
    $xml_writer->startElement('book');
    $xml_writer->writeElement('name',$key);
    $xml_writer->writeElement('url',$value);
    $xml_writer->endElement(); //book
}
$xml_writer->endElement(); //books
$xml_data = $xml_writer->outputMemory();
fwrite($file,$xml_data);
fclose($file);

And in index.php, i have the following code to send the contents of the file as a response

<?php
    //Send the xml file contents as response
    header('Content-type: text/xml');
    readfile('book_results.xml');
?>

What could be causing the error ?

Please help. Thank You.

Upvotes: 3

Answers (6)

mark

Reputation: 11

xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' standalone='yes'

use single quote.

Upvotes: 0

brianary

Reputation: 9332

Ensure that you are writing UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII encoding to the file (test with a text editor or the 'file' command, if you have it), and that your checker supports it. Keep in mind that UTF-8 can include a signature (sometimes called the byte-order mark) in the first three bytes (EF BB BF) that sometimes confuses some tools if it is there, and rarely if it is not.

Upvotes: 0

Brian Agnew

Reputation: 272417

The above looks good to me (including the fact that you're forming the XML via a dedicated component) and either:

what you're using to validate this is wrong
you're looking at something different to what you think you are

I would definitely try another tool/browser/whatever to validate this. Additionally, you may want to save the XML file as sent to the browser, and check it using XMLStarlet (a command-line XML toolkit).

I'm wondering also if it's an issue that we can't easily see - a character encoding problem or a Byte-Order-Mark issue (related to encodings). Does the character encoding of the web page you're sending match/differ from the encoding of the XML (UTF-8).

Upvotes: 3

Ken White

Reputation: 125757

It validates fine in WMHelp XMLPad 3.0.1.0, and opens fine in FireFox 3.0.8 and IE7 without errors.

The only thing I can see, from a copy and paste of your XML, is that the XML declaration is followed by a CR/LF combination (0x0D0x0A). This is platform specific (Windows), and may be an issue on the client; you didn't mention what the client was, however, so I can't be sure if that's the problem.

Upvotes: 0