[Plugin: Movable Type Backup Importer] Fatal error: Call to children (line 222)

Hi Fishback, there might be some special (illegal) characters in your XML file. Have you tried to open up the XML file in a browser (e.g. Firefox) to see if it shows some errors?

I’ve got that same error.

When I open my xml file in in a browser, i get:

This page contains the following errors:
error on line 6799 at column 155: Encoding error
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

Any suggestions?

I’m trying to get an import that includes tags, the regular importer worked well, but thew away all my tags. I was hopeful that this would get the tags…

Hi. Had the same problem, but I managed to have a workaround. Here’s how.

A commenter seeking for help had pasted some weird characters which came from a modem configuration and some protocol feedback.

That small strings where easily located using firefox to just make the line and column pop out. Weird chars were seen at plain view. I just striped them using a good text editor (notepad++ is good as it is able to handle big files, and has a colored text rendering). The XML then was right.

Next, I had to chunk the backup into small pieces. I did it by hand. Just keep in every chunk both <movabletype [...]> start and<blog>[....]</blog> block at header. I cut the file being careful not having a tag sliced.

Then renamed the chunk as the whole original file (I.E: Movable_Type-2012-04-20-18-40-09-Backup.xml), FTPed it, and then process with the plugin. Iterate until you finish with all chunks.

Done. Having the pretty urls be the same as the old MT, would be fine! ??

I’ve been having a look and it seems it works. Hope it helps.

Cheers.

I ran into this issue due to non ascii characters in the recovery file. The exporter for some reason stuck them in the file… To fix this I did the following:

# perl -i.bak -pe ‘s/[^[:ascii:]]//g’ *.xml

This stripped out all of the non ascii chars from the xml files and the import then worked successfully.