Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.I just saw the following error:
Error contacting VAT verification service: Service return error - XML error parsing SOAP payload on line 2: Invalid character.
This happens while attempting to do VAT validation for a Swedish company that has the character "ö" in its address, which is being returned as part of the SOAP response. Not being familiar with the SOAP Client module in detail, I hacked up a small test script that does an HTTP POST with curl, which breaks if the POST Content-Type header is text/xml; charset=iso-8859-1 but succeeds when it's text/xml; charset=utf-8.
Can someone confirm that soapclient_init_client uses something other than UTF-8 by default, and if so, is there a way to either make the charset configurable, or just use UTF-8?
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | soap-utf8.patch | 1.18 KB | wimh |
Comments
Comment #1
wimh commentednuSOAP seems to default to ISO-8859-1. I've attached a patch that allows an alternative encoding to be passed in to soapclient_init_client(), can you give it a try?
Comment #2
bartezz commentedTried 6.x-3.x-dev but still encountering the exact same error/issue :(
Checked the manual service and the VAT number is recognized AND correct?
Increased to major as this prevents new accounts from being created :(
Cheers,
Bart
Comment #3
bartezz commentedHmmm went into soap module and changed nusoap.php
var $soap_defencoding = 'ISO-8859-1';
//var $soap_defencoding = 'UTF-8';
to
//var $soap_defencoding = 'ISO-8859-1';
var $soap_defencoding = 'UTF-8';
That solved it... didn't like this hack so changed it back. But the issue is now gone. Seems like the fix above does work but maybe I had some caching issues? Will let you know if I encounter this again!
Cheers