svn: Malformed XML: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 2

Your Problem

You are using the revision control subversion. You are calling a svn command such as svn cleanup . or svn st and get the following error message:

> svn cleanup .
svn: Malformed XML: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 2

This problem occurred on my system after changing from SuSE 9.0 to SuSE 9.1.

The Reason

The reason is a corrupted XML file in the .svn subdirectory of your current directory or one of your subdirectories. The name of the file is log. It seems to contain some kind of log or journal information. The error is that the first part of the file is simply missing resulting in a malformed XML file.

The Solution

First find the right subdirectory: Do a svn cleanup . in various subdirectories. Find the deepest subdirectory where the upper error occurs.

Then change into the (hidden) subdirectoy .svn and open the file named log:

> cd .svn
> ls
dir-prop-base  entries  log        README.txt  wcprops
dir-props      format   prop-base  text-base
empty-file     lock     props      tmp

Now check with head the beginning of that file. A damaged file begins like this:

> head log
ame="Kapitel-06.tex"
   text-time="2004-04-11T16:41:44.000000Z"
   committed-date="2004-04-11T21:36:46.947546Z"
   checksum="982a672d96ab994030e864a9ce38befb"
   last-author="mk"
   kind="file"/>
<entry
   committed-rev="5"
   name="Kapitel-07.tex"
   text-time="2004-04-12T15:31:10.000000Z"

A good file should start with a valid XML tag, which starts with an opening bracket < like this:

> head log
<modify-entry
   committed-rev="6"
   name=""/>
<modify-entry
   name=""
   committed-date="2004-04-12T15:45:32.289974Z"/>
<modify-entry
   name=""
   last-author="mk"/>
<modify-entry

If your file looks damaged, rename or delete it:

> mv log log.damaged

Now change back to the directory where you error occurred and everything should work again.

Keywords: svn cleanup xml malformed suse91 utf8 wollformed invalid token subversion   Author: Mathias Kettner