Name cannot begin with the ' ' character

Question

I\'m parsing some XML in C#. I\'m getting it from a database, and so converting it to a MemoryStream before reading it with an XmlTextReader. The problem is that I get this

Answer 1

You also should be carefull and avoid expressions like:

<e order="0" type="custom" name= "test">

The blank space that follows the name's equal could make your code crash

Answer 2

If in SSIS, just go to Solution Explorer, select the project then select "Rebuild Solution" from the Build menu option.

Answer 3

Your error message is quite explicit, you have an error at posn 3 in line 1. Try <?xml -- no space.

Answer 4

Remove the first space in the document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Answer 5

I was getting the same error reading an XML file.

It turned out I had an errant < character in my file.

I was commenting out certain child nodes and when erasing one of the comment tags, I left an extra < in the file. The error message came back "Name cannot begin with the '\r' character" and this question was the top google result for that exact search.

<node>
    <!-- <child /> --><
    <child />
    <child />
</node>

Answer 6

I had a lot of errors because of this. Make sure you don't have spaces. There are two places I removed spaces that worked for me.

Was:

xmlns: xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

What worked:

xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

There was a space here too: < abc:def >. Remove all the spaces around the < and the >.