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Word 2013 document will not open - illegal xml character - HELP Me

Hi Friends

I’m so glad for fellowship with you. I have a dis-commodity for you.
when I want open my word file, I can not and I have this problem: illegal xml character.  and gave location Part:  /word/document.xml, Line: 2, Column 2643796
I read yours comments in the other site, but I couldn’t solve my problem, for this reason, I'm sent my word file link for you and I hopefully you can help me, If you could open this file and save as a new word file and sent me(So I can open it), I am so grateful to you

my word file link: http://s6.picofile.com/d/c91370a9-dbb8-45fd-9b5e-183578f41ac5/Petroleum_Fiscal_Regimes.docx

Great thanks

Hello Adel,

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

We need some information regarding the issue. Let us know the following:

Is this issue happening to one Word document or many/all Word documents?

In case the issue happens to one or a few Word documents then in order to resolve this issue you may follow the suggestion provided in the following article:

http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/918429

Note: Follow the steps described for Word 2010 from the above article to resolve the issue.

Hope the above steps help. Let us know if you need further information or assistance.

Thank you.

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Sorry, your file was corrupted beyond repair. The most common cause of this is use a USB flash drive as a working drive while you are writing. You may be able to extract some content by using File Open in WordPad, changing the file type to All Documents (*.*) and opening your Word file.
Author of "OOXML Hacking - Unlocking Microsoft Office's Secrets", ebook now out
John Korchok, Production Manager
production@brandwares.com

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This is the first time I am faced with this problem, Thank you very much for your kindness. Mohan Suryanarayan, Your advice was good, but I think Mr. John Korchok correct said. my file was in the flash memory and I worked with it.

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This is the first time I am faced with this problem, Thank you very much for your kindness. Mr. John Korchok, you correct said. My file was in the flash memory and I worked with it.  I have very important data in this file but I could not open it.

There is no way to recover this file?

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I'm afraid not. The type of corruption from the flash drive is random and can delete tiny to huge chunks of the document. 

Other than the WordPad technique (thanks to Doug Robbins), by which you might recover some content, the file is scrambled.

And Word needs to start testing media before opening files! Yeesh!

Author of "OOXML Hacking - Unlocking Microsoft Office's Secrets", ebook now out
John Korchok, Production Manager
production@brandwares.com

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Before asking my question, I hope this your solution:

You may be able to repair this manually. Office documents are really zip files with a different ending.

  1. Make a copy of your document to a new folder.
  2. Change the file ending of the document copy from .docx to .zip
  3. Unzip the file
  4. You will get 3 folders plus an XML file
  5. Open the word folder
  6. Your document text is in document.xml. Open it in a text editor that has XML tools (I like Notepad++).
  7. The XML is linearized, so not very readable. First find column 100959 in line 1. If it's in a text area (not XML markup), replace the character at that position with something else. The XML tools in your text editor may also help you check for errors in the file.
  8. Save the modified file.
  9. Rezip the 3 folders and [Content_Types].xml.
  10. Change the file ending back to .docx and open in Word. Word is very finicky about it's XML and may not report details about errors, so it might take a few tries.

If all else fails, you can extract the text from document.xml and paste it into a new document.

anyway, Thanks a lot, At least I got rid of confusion.

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Last updated May 31, 2023 Views 2,764 Applies to: