vb.net XML parsing error

[hd95]

In a perfect world my xml feed source would produce perfect xml ..that is not the case

I am parsing an XML feed that sometimes has ampersands and dashes in the content that messes up my parsing.

I've tried doing pre processing with find/replace to get rid of these characters but then I get another type of error

"An unexpected end of file parsing CDATA has occurred"

So to get around that error I've added in unicoding and removing non-printable chars with no success.

here's my code...or a summary of it

   
' grab rss feed to a stream
Dim myRequest As System.Net.WebRequest = System.Net.WebRequest.Create(url)
Dim myResponse As System.Net.WebResponse = myRequest.GetResponse

' convert stream to string for pre-processing
Dim rdr As New StreamReader(myResponse.GetResponseStream())
s = rdr.ReadToEnd
'remove non print chars
s = Regex.Replace(s, "\s", " ")
'convert to unicode
Dim uni As New UnicodeEncoding
Dim encodedBytes As Byte() = uni.GetBytes(s)
Dim decodedString As String = uni.GetString(encodedBytes)
s = decodedString 

'remove standalone dashes and amps
s = s.Replace(" & ", " and ")
s = s.Replace(" - ", " - ")

'feed the string back in a stream for the XmlTextReader

Dim memoryStream As New MemoryStream
Dim streamWriter As New StreamWriter(memoryStream)
streamWriter.Write(s)
memoryStream.Position = 0
Dim XmlReader As New XmlTextReader(memoryStream)

' start xml parsing from here

and that doesn't work either

help anyone? thanks

[hd95]

the answer

this got rid of the garbage in the stream where modified string was written to it

streamWriter.Au toFlush = True