>You wouldn't believe what's out there (except you've been out there and seen even more crap than I did). I had to handle a headerless xml, with numerous inconsistencies in naming but generously peppered with sixtuple line breaks - from a company whose worth is in dozens of millions and whose main reason to exist is exchange and aggregation of information and then passing the processed and validated data further down the chain. IOW, a professional intermediary makes millions passing xml back and forth - and still can't get around to have a header in it. Luckily, MS Xml parser doesn't care, reads it fine.

XML header is actually optional - it's only required if you need to change the encoding of the document. If not provided UTF encoding is defaulted.

Other stuff - you don't have to tell me, but I'm bringing it up because that's the responsibility of the vendor publishing the XML and if you don't let them know and fix their problems they'll just hoist that same crap onto the next guy trying to use the data/api. So I make it a point to always point out these things to whoever is responsible for providing the data. Mostly it falls on deaf ears, but occasionally you get lucky and it actually gets fixed...

+++ Rick ---