Hi Don,

Yes you are right, but how can I overcome this '&' problem? I've tried to put '\' before '&' but it's doesn't work.

many thanks!

Nan

You could regex the &:

   $line =~ s/(&)/$1amp;/g;
[download]


Don
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Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature

That would potentially disastrous effects if the XML contained any entities.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

I think the proper way to control this sort of operation -- and keep it from screwing up other entity references (like &egrave; and &lt;, etc) is something like this:

   s/&(?!\w+;)/&/;
[download]

This is just assuming that every valid entity reference that might exist in the original text is limited to alphanumerics and underscores between the initial ampersand and the final semi-colon, which is probably a safe-enough assumption.

But keep a backup of the original. If the data still causes parse errors after this simple edit, they might be different problems you haven't fixed yet, or they might be problems created by this simple edit. Careful diagnosis would be needed in that case.

Hi Don,

Sorry I used $line =~ s/(&)/(& amp;)/g; would it be different with yours?

Many thanks, Nan