Need to prevent special character in generated XML file

Question

Hello,
I am using E-business Suite 12.1.3 and XML version 5.6.3.
My XML file is ending up with a special character (a Latin capital letter U with circumflex) at the end, after the final closing tag.
Due to this the concurrent program that needs to output the XML is ending with warning.
My XML file is produced using a PL/SQL procedure, as follows (I've simplified it):
FND_FILE.PUT_LINE(FND_FILE.OUTPUT,'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>');
FND_FILE.PUT_LINE(FND_FILE.OUTPUT,'<DOCS>');
FND_FILE.PUT_LINE(FND_FILE.OUTPUT,'<LETTER>');
FND_FILE.PUT_LINE(FND_FILE.OUTPUT,'<EMP_NAME>Michaela Hart</EMP_NAME>');
FND_FILE.PUT_LINE(FND_FILE.OUTPUT,'</LETTER>');
FND_FILE.PUT_LINE(FND_FILE.OUTPUT,'</DOCS>');
But when I run the concurrent request that creates the output then try to view the output in Internet Explorer I get the following error:
Invalid at the top level of the document. Error processing resource 'http://servername.domain...
</DOCS>
If I view the source of the page in Internet Explorer it shows a square after </DOCS> indicating the special character that has been added.
I checked this by looking at the output file in unix (cat -v o7766582.req) and it showed up the Latin U character.
I realise it could be to do with the character set I am using. I checked what we had on the server:
> echo $NLS_LANG
American_America.UTF8
I would have thought that corresponded with the XML declaration character set but I'm not sure.
Does anyone have any other ideas about why I have this special character, and how it could be removed?
Thanks in advance,
Hazel

Answer 1

Hi AlexAnd,
thanks very much for your reply.
I'm now unable to recreate the problem since dbms_xmlgen worked. If I switch back to my previous method it works fine!
I'm not sure your suggestion would help, as there were no special characters in the data, the special character was added after the last tag I output. I hard coded the data (as in my example) for testing purposes so there was no SQL in use and the special character was still added at the end of the XML output. But I will definitely give it a try if I get the problem again.
I had the idea that maybe I should have been using FND_FILE.PUT rather than FND_FILE.PUT_LINE but now the error is gone I can't tell if that would have solved the problem either.
I appreciate your input.
Regards
Hazel