XML Publisher Report - Invalid character was found in text content

Question

Hi Techies,
Version Background
Oracle apps : 11.5.10
Oracle 9i Database
Oracle Reports 6i
I created a XML output type concurrent program and attached a data definition & template to it.
My program completed with status "Warning".
The Error is : An invalid character was found in text content.
Then i downloaded the XML and opened it in notepad++. I found there are 2 weird characters like this ( , )
FYI, It is a non-Ascii character so not able to paste it in this forum text field. the characters looks like double sided arrow and a forward arrow.
I also tried loading the XML locally from RTF Template. Again it throws me same error
Error No: -1072896760: An invalid character was found in text content.
Additional Information:
Data is coming from table "gl_alloc_batches.description"
Encoding Type: UTF-8
Please Help me how to handle such a non-ascii characters
Edited by: 868779 on Feb 22, 2012 10:48 PM

Answer 1

Hi,
Please find below sql which will find the special characters in column of table,
SET serveroutput ON size 1000000
DECLARE
PROCEDURE gooey (v_table VARCHAR2, v_column VARCHAR2)
IS
TYPE t_id IS TABLE OF NUMBER;
TYPE t_dump IS TABLE OF VARCHAR2 (20000);
TYPE t_data IS TABLE OF VARCHAR2 (20000);
l_id t_id;
l_data t_data;
l_dump t_dump;
CURSOR a
IS
SELECT DISTINCT column_name
FROM dba_tab_columns
WHERE table_name = v_table
AND data_type = 'VARCHAR2'
AND column_name NOT IN ('CUSTOMER_KEY', 'ADDRESS_KEY');
BEGIN
FOR x IN a
LOOP
l_id := NULL;
l_data := NULL;
l_dump := NULL;
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'SELECT '
|| v_column
|| ', '
|| x.column_name
|| ', '
|| 'dump('
|| x.column_name
|| ')'
|| ' FROM '
|| v_table
|| ' WHERE RTRIM((LTRIM(REPLACE(TRANSLATE('
|| x.column_name
|| ',''ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789@#$%^&*()_+
-=,!\`~{}./?:";''''[ ]'',''A''), ''A'', '''')))) IS NOT NULL'
BULK COLLECT INTO l_id, l_data, l_dump;
IF l_id IS NOT NULL
THEN
FOR k IN 1 .. l_id.COUNT
LOOP
DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ( v_table
|| ' - '
|| x.column_name
|| ' - '
|| TO_CHAR (l_id (k), '999999999999')
DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (l_data (k));
DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (l_dump (k));
DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ('*********************');
END LOOP;
END IF;
END LOOP;
END gooey;
BEGIN
gooey ('GL_ALLOC_BATCHES', 'DESCRIPTION');
END;
Thanks,
Amogh