Handling special char at BizTalk end?

Question

I am receiving message as flat file which may contain special char like <> ' "....... etc
Can any one tell me how can i handle it at BizTalk end.
If i am converting it into xml due to data, it is not a valid xml.
<FirstName> <John miller</FirstName>
And single quotes ' can create problem in sql query .
Can any one let me know how could i handle it.

Answer 1

Hi Phill,
Let’s be clear when you mean by “special character” in flat-file schema.
If the special character which your referring are not the delimiters used in your schema or any escape characters (about escape characters I’ll refer later), then as la
Cour said, XML shall handle them without any issues. If you have these characters, as you highlighted, you will have XML file/element like “<FirstName>
<John miller</FirstName>”. It’s still a valid XML file.
But if you don’t want this characters to be saved into SQL database i.e for the above XML element if don’t want the character “<” saved along with “John
miller” as “<John miller”, then you need to have a custom pipeline component to remove those characters.
Escape character:
If you know that a character which could come in an element, then you can use “Escape Character” property for the element where you can specify the character you want to
ignore. i.e of you expect character “<” to come with FirstName element, then you can specify the escape character property as “<” in the “FirstName” element.
More special character to ignore:
As said XML can parse these characters without issue. But if you don’t want to send those characters to your destination system (SQL), then after parsing the flat-file into
XML, use a custom pipeline component to replace all the special character from the parsed XML.
Following article discuss about this concept:
How
to remove invalid character in incoming XML message using custom pipeline component
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