not well formed (invalid token)

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear monks I have a problem when I want to access some files which are in non-Enlish letters. I have this:

<english id="337">Barings was Britain's oldest merchant bank.</english
+>
<french id="337">La Barings était la plus vieille banque daffaires dAn
+gleterre.</french>
[download]

and I want to access it using XML:XPATH but i get this error:

not well-formed (invalid token) at line 4, column 28, byte 109:
[download]

It is becayse of the first character of "était". How it can be solved without touching the input data? Thanks.

Comment on not well formed (invalid token) Select or Download Code

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Re: not well formed (invalid token) by Corion (Patriarch) on Nov 04, 2009 at 10:37 UTC
That looks like your data might be Unicode encoded as UTF-8. So you will have to decode the data prior to using XML::XPath on it, or tell XML::XPath to decode it properly.	[reply]
Re^2: not well formed (invalid token) by Anonymous Monk on Nov 04, 2009 at 10:40 UTC
any clue how to decode it?	[reply]
Re^3: not well formed (invalid token) by Corion (Patriarch) on Nov 04, 2009 at 10:42 UTC
Yes. See the Encode module which I already linked in my previous reply.	[reply]
Re^4: not well formed (invalid token) by Anonymous Monk on Nov 04, 2009 at 10:58 UTC
Re^5: not well formed (invalid token) by moritz (Cardinal) on Nov 04, 2009 at 11:06 UTC
Re: not well formed (invalid token) by Jenda (Abbot) on Nov 04, 2009 at 14:13 UTC
Looks like the XML is missing the encoding specification so the parser thinks it's UTF8 and complains if it's not. Try to add `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>` [download] on top of the file. (Replace the ISO-8859-1 by whatever encoding the files use.) Until then the files are not correct XML. Jenda Enoch was right! Enjoy the last years of Rome.	[reply] [d/l]