Illegal Character in Database XML file

[JSpradlin]

I edited my database XML files by hand for Future Pinball, VP993, VPPM5, and VPX. I needed to change many occurrences of a couple of tags and figured doing it by hand would be faster than using Game Manager. After editing PinballX would just bounce me back into Windows once started. So I tried loading each database in the Game Manager. All of them loaded fine except for the VPX file. This database gives me an error about an illegal character in the file. Is there a quick way to locate a typo/illegal character, or am I stuck eyeballing the entire XML?

[Draco1962]

I think you are stuck, my friend, giving it the ol' eyeball.

[Adultery]

Yeah, if you try and do a replace, you'll take out something important. If you know RegEx, you can specify patterns and only search node strings. Gonna be tricky though.

[JSpradlin]

Yeah I figured. I have an older copy from about a 3 months ago to compare it to. It's just missing more recently installed games (of which there are a number). It's a shame I don't have an easy way to just show the lines in the files that are different. I'm sure that can be scripted, but It would probably take longer than just eyeballing.

Update: Actually found an ahk script to do this. Hopefully that will make the process faster.

[JSpradlin]

So it turns out that PinballX does not like quotation marks in the Description field (even when using the " syntax). Four tiny little lines create a big hassle.

[Adultery]

 

That's one alright. It should support & quot ; though, I'm surprised it's not properly escaping that.