❔ how to test for invalid chars before xml serialisation?
inside the xml serialiser System.Xml.XmlCharType.IsCharData(char ch) is called.
but XmlCharType is internal, so i can't do that check myself without doing naughty reflection things to bypass visibility barriers.
is there some way i can detect funny chars myself, without cloning that code? Ideally i'd like to do a pre-process pass over the text to handle funky chars (or an exception handler to post-process and retry on exception)
(i'm forced to accept free text user input without an opportunity to reject it - i can't just exception and produce no XML at all here .. at the very least i should be able to detect and handle the junk record ...=)
4 Replies
the specific issue here was a char(2) embedded in a string, that crashed the file creation.
checking the source code only the following utf16 chars will crash the xml serialiser, so i could implement this myself if i have to ...:
but there is already a well optimised access to an in-memory lookup table within that function ...
so are you saying this internal method would check for the problematic chars you found?
how much is probable that the users enter those characters?
how much speed is an issue?
i thought the serializer was pretty safe, never had crashes with it i believe
I'm inclined to say that you should just let the serializer handle it, but I'm guessiNg the APIs are poor? E.G. it just
throws when encountering a bad character?
what is your intention for doing this check yourself, instead of letting the serializer do it?Was this issue resolved? If so, run
/close - otherwise I will mark this as stale and this post will be archived until there is new activity.