Comments on: The Processing Instruction Target Matching “[xX][mM][lL]” is Not Allowed

By: Asma Khanam

Asma Khanam — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:46:51 +0000

One more reason for failure of parsing could be the doctype. For example if the xml file contains a doctype element
and .dtd is not found. then also it will through the same error. Simply thing to avoid this error is just replace the line with empty space.

By: Pavel M.

Pavel M. — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 08:42:49 +0000

I was playing about with the eBay developer web services and found out that the xmlns set on the root element was invalid. This resulted in the above error.

Here’s the xml:

…

But if you try and go to the URL in the xmlns you will see it’s page not found. And this was causing the problem.

In PHP I just did a string replace to eliminate it just because I needed a very quick fix.
Hope this helps someone.

By: Direct mail

Direct mail — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:54:09 +0000

I too came up with the same error where it showed that the processing instruction was not allowed while I was trying to construct a similar variable as yours. Since I could not find anything particularly wrong about the code, I had to stop the work. Now that you have come up with the solution for this, I was able to rectify the situation. I never thought that the presence of characters before the starting XML would create such an obstruction.

By: Ankit Maheshwari

Ankit Maheshwari — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:19:54 +0000

Thanx for the reply…..it solved my pblm….just edit the file using text and remove white spaces from the beginning.

By: Horn

Horn — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:06:51 +0000

Thank you all. I happened to stumble into that annoying mistake too. Emacs showed me that there’d been a full line of white spaces in the beginning of my XML file. No idea why i didn’t notice that in other text editors.

By: Nitheesh R

Nitheesh R — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 07:04:04 +0000

Thanks a lot ..

By: jks

jks — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:44:04 +0000

I had this weird error and was searching the net for some answers….and found this site!! Thank you soo much – you solved my problem!!! i should have searched the net before…

By: Dima

Dima — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:58:23 +0000

After some tests I found out that
the first line in the XML file

must be in lower case. Otherwise the same error shows up:
“The Processing Instruction Target
Matching “[xX][mM][lL]” is Not Allowed”
Also the tags in the schema should be the same case as the tags in the XML file.

Thanks for your help

By: Anuj Gakhar

Anuj Gakhar — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:44:38 +0000

@Dima, I dont think that should make a difference. Did you test it out?

By: Dima

Dima — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:59:22 +0000

Would it matter to a parser if the string that contains contents of xml file is all in upper case?

I think this is the issue for me.
I havent tested it yet