How to resolve special character XBRL submission error

Published: 29/03/2021

When submitting on the CIPC portal, one or more of the following rejection errors are encountered.

“The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup.”
“XML document structures must start and end within the same entity.”
“Premature end of file.”

Alternatively, when opening the iXHTML file you see the following type of error:

Instructions:

To resolve:

Open the exported file (XHTML file) using any internet browser
Right-click on the file and select View page source
Search for the error line (e.g scroll down to the line 15094 that is referred to in the error message)
The error line would highlight the line item that has an issue (e.g Assets < 7000, in this case the special character is the less than sign)
Open your Financial Statements and search for the keyword ‘Assets < 7000’ in the financials:
Remove the special character in the description of the line:

For example in Assets < R7000, the "<" can be replaced with "less than"
(Kindly Note: these characters could be in table description columns or in input text paragraphs and there may be more than one, in which case remove all)

Once the special characters are removed, Validate & Export

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