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 error: Name cannot begin with the ' ' character, hexadecimal value 0x20. Line 1, position 3. Following is my XML and my code for reading it (it's coming out of the database alright, no blank first character). Any suggestions?

XML:

<? xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<form>
   <e order="0" type="custom" name="test">
      <fi type="text" />
      <o />
   </e>
   <e order="1" type="zip" />
   <e order="2" type="state" />
</form>

C#:

byte[] byteArray = new byte[formXml.Length];
System.Text.UTF8Encoding encoding = new System.Text.UTF8Encoding();
byteArray = encoding.GetBytes(formXml);
MemoryStream xmlStream = new MemoryStream(byteArray);

XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(xmlStream);
while (xmlReader.Read())
{
    if (xmlReader.HasValue)
    {
        returnString += xmlReader.Depth.ToString();
    }
}

I thought it could be the encoding, but I've tried by UTF8 and ASCII and can't find anything.

Answer 1

Yes, you should delete the space between <? and xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<form>
   <e order="0" type="custom" name="test">
      <fi type="text" />
      <o />
   </e>
   <e order="1" type="zip" />
   <e order="2" type="state" />
</form>

Here's the relevant XML spec.

Answer 2

Another common source of this error is when the XmlReader attempts to read your scripts as xml. That's a good reason to start commenting out scripts after the script tags. They will still run:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
    function myFunction() {
    }
    ...
-->
</script>

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

My error in same case was that file wasn't saved as UTF-8.

Answer 6

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 7

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 8

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 >.