Some characters cause a smart tag list to fail

When you install a Smart Tag List and then start Microsoft Excel, the Smart Tag List fails to load. Alternatively, in Microsoft Internet Explorer, when you open the Extensible Markup Language (XML) file created for a Smart Tag List, you receive an error message similar to the following:

The ampersand (&), quotation mark ("), apostrophe ('), and element delimeters (<) and (>), are not allowed within parsed character data, such as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

To work around the issue, use either of the following methods.

Method 1: Use Entity References

Use entity references instead of the actual characters:

• Instead of &, use &amp;
• Instead of ", use &quot;
• Instead of ', use &apos;
• Instead of <, use <
• Instead of >, use >

For example, in the following URL you can replace the ampersand with &amp; as below:

Method 2: Use the CDATA Construct

Use the CDATA construct, which treats the entire string as plain text, for example:

For more information about smart tag lists, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about XML, entity references, and the CDATA construct, see the XML Developer's Guide at the Microsoft Developer Network Library.