Corrupted a file now get "no suitable backend found"

[John Ralls]

On Nov 17, 2013, at 6:12 AM, Dennis Shimer <dshimer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Right, obviously lesson learned.  However let me expand a bit.  I was
> thinking that since this is just a text file, I could open it in an editor
> and change some errant text in the account names so thats what I did.  I'd
> like to know the error in my logic. Is there some kind of connection that I
> don't know about that goes beyond gnucash reading that XML file when
> opening? Is there something in the account name (or other account)
> attributes that are off limits to changing outside the gnucash environment?
> 
> In this case I'm on a 64bit Linux and edited the file with vi if that
> matters.
> 

An XML file isn't quite "just a text file", so you should use an editor that checks the validity of the XML and helps you find errors. I use nxml-mode in emacs for this. It's probably something really simple like a mismatched quote in one of the values you changed unless you used '<' or '&' in a name or code: Those two characters are reserved in XML and must be escaped as < or & respectively. The semicolon at the end is part of the escape.

Regards,
John Ralls