Invalid character in the given encoding

You might receive the following message when AceViewer opens an ACES file:

“Invalid character in the given encoding. Line 55, Position 76.”

Looking in the file, you might see something like this in a Note tag:

GLOW PLUG / BOUGIE DE RÉCHAUFFEMENT

This is not a problem except that you have included this line at the beginning of the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

This tells us that you are using the UTF-8 Unicode standard. In UTF-8 all Unicode characters with codes below 128 are encoded in one byte. Each of those Unicode characters has a corresponding character in the ASCII character set, and the encoding of that character (in ASCII) is identical to the encoding of the Unicode character in UTF-8. Above 128, you need multiple characters to represent one character. In the case above, É is ASCII 201.

If you change the encoding to:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

It should work for you (although, I’m not sure what your receiver wants). Another solution is to just change the file into a true UTF-8 format. We use this free text editor:

https://www.pspad.com/

It also has a Hex editor built in, and you can see that it changed the character to two characters (as required by UTF-8).

Another good editor specific to xml with strong encoding options is:

https://www.firstobject.com/dn_editor.htm

Revised: 2011-05-11