I am using XML::Simple to parse some xml-ish data.

The problem is that someplace in the data (there are a lot of records) there is something that is invalid. I get the most unhelpful error 

Name contains invalid start character: ' '

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I have no control over the data coming in, and making sure that I get ALL the data is not as important as just having some data, so I want to just erase any chars from the file that are invalid.

Is there such a think as an XML vildifier module out there? Forcing the data to become valid XML so that XML::Simple can parse it?

If not, any suggestions? (which brings up another mystery to me) I tried to just substitute out anything that is not a word char (and of course the > & </ ) but for some reason when I did

$file =~ s!¥W!!gs;

Everything in $file disapears. ¥W means non-word char right?

In reply to Forcing XML to validate by Anonymous Monk

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