Facebook XML File too long

Hi,

Thanks for using our plugin and reaching out to us. Yes we had 2 more users reporting the exact same issue with us.

So far we were able to break it down to this:

• We haven’t been making any changes to the plugin that could be causing this.
• When we create a test feed of our own and upload that into our Facebook catalogue it works fine and we are not getting the error message you are seeing.

Hence, our guess is that it has to do with the product data in the feed itself and Facebook changing some of its criteria for it. We don’t think it is the feed itself.

Could you try two things for us to see if it solves the issue at hand?

• Could you remove the product descriptions from the feed? We suspect it might have something to do with product descriptions that are too long
• Disable the Google Analytics feature of the plugin so the links in the feed become shorter

Thanks!

Removing the description will reduce the size of the row and it should work as it won’t reach facebooks limits. What I did was to download the feed and manually add new line at the middle of the xml file and then upload it and it works.

So I guess this is new limitation by Facebook and people with large feeds will have this issue.

Isn’t it possible to apply the same limitation on the plugin to add new line on every 5million symbols for example?

That is not how XML works, when you open it in the browser you’ll see a proper XML-hierarchy and that is also how XML feeds are read.

Are your product descriptions really long? We noticed there is a limit of 5000 characters and it does appear some of the fields got a character limitation on them all of a sudden by Facebook.

Okay, when you download it and open with notepad it shows on single line all the code. Why when I add new line it gets accepted and with single line no? At least this is the original fb error: “Line 2 of XML file too long. We have a limit of 5242880 per line to
avoid our processing from failing.Please format your XML into multiple
lines.”

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by anstoyanov.

Hi, I have the same issue for a few days now!

I just have removed the product descriptions from the feed and disabled the Google Analytics feature of the plugin and there is still the same error.

When I have saved xml file and opened it in excel – all feed information is in line number 2.
Normally feed information is divided into columns, but now everything is in line 2.
I have sent you screenshots today to your email ([email protected]) so you can excatly see how it looks like.

I am having the same problem. I contacted Facebook support and this is their response:

“It appears that the feed file is in XML format, which is not properly formatted.

Common errors for example:

– doesn’t begin with <?xml declaration tag
– Tags are not terminated. For example, every tag must start and end properly: <g:sale_price>50 USD</g:sale_price>. This is especially true even for </channel> </rss> tags
– Special characters MUST be escaped. The most common use case of this is the & (ampersand) symbol. When using this in a field, you must wrap it in <![CDATA[kind of like & this]]>

Please also note:

We have a limit of {upper_limit} per line to avoid our processing from failing. Please format your XML into multiple lines.

The limit is 5MB – This means that if a single line in an XML feed file is too long (5MB worth of characters) then it will cause this error.

Solution is to properly format the feed – one line per field and not squeeze the entire feed into just 1 line.”

@spektorniv you are right. I downloaded the feed and tried to import manually. Same issue. But when edited the feed in notepad and just added new line somewhere in the middle of the file, it was accepted and all products were updated properly.

@supportadtribes any idea how we can resolve this issue?

Not yet, our developers are working on it. Some checks on the side of Facebook apparently became stricter causing this to happen for larger feeds. As soon as we’ve got a fix for this we will push out a new release.

Hi all,

Just to let you know that we are currently testing the fix. We expect to be able to push out a new release tomorrow.

Hi all,

We have just pushed out a new version of the plugin, 8.2.9, it should solve the issue at hand. Can you give it a try?

@supportadtribes I can confirm it’s fixed on my end! Thank you! Feed is now being processed normally.

@supportadtribes Mine is still not working, it’s showing the same issue.

@anstoyanov have you created new feed or previously created feed started working? Are you using it on Facebook?

@socialtigers just refreshed the feed and cleared the cache. If you haven’t refreshed the feed it should not work I guess…

@supportadtribes Hi, I have downloaded the plugin update and refreshed the feed. Then I tried to upload the feed on facebook and it still says that “129397 row is too long”. Any idea what I can do more?