GSquared (12/15/2011)
Another possibility occurs to me:Most "illegal XML character" errors I've run into have been ampersands ("&"). A few have been brackets. Since it's nvarchar(max), you can:
select *from dbo.MyTable
where MyNvarcharColumn like '%[%]%';
That will give you rows that have an ampersand in the XML. Then you'll need to fix those rows, of course.
Thanks again. Yes, I have tried a cursor -- I will post the code next after trying your search above.
Interestingly, when I select only each column from the table along with the relevant id columns, I get no error. But when I encapsulate the column in a call to the function to extract the required XML element value, I get the error. I'm going to take a closer look at how the functions process the data and see where that leads.
Thanks again,
webrunner
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A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html