Corrupted a file now get "no suitable backend found"

[Dennis Shimer]

Bang! Got it.  All involved sent me in the right direction.  It was the
screwy keyboard that added some characters at the top of the file.  With
the idea of needing to check the XML and not knowing the best way I ended
up at.

http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GnuCash_XML_format#Validation

installed jing and ran as advised which yielded

FileName.gnucash:1:1: fatal: Content is not allowed in prolog.

Which I didn't have to understand much to realize I needed to look for
something bad at the beginning of the file. There it was, characters
outside all XML tags.

Thanks all


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 11:24 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
> 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