Characters Accepted by CRA

CRA Acceptable Characters

CRA has clarified their restrictions on the characters (letters/numbers/symbols) that will be accepted in electronic submission (XML) files for a number of types of data fields. These restrictions apply to addresses, recipient names, certification and contact names and other data fields. We have been assured by CRA that XML submissions following these guidelines will not be rejected when uploaded.

Acceptable Character Lists

These are the accepted character lists that apply to addresses, recipient names, certification and contact names, and other data elements; click one of the links below for details:

Addresses - Characters accepted by CRA
Recipient Names - Characters accepted by CRA
Contact Names - Characters accepted by CRA
Other Data - Characters accepted by CRA

What Will eForms Do?

AvanTax eForms will warn the user when it encounters characters that do not follow CRA’s guidelines as data is imported, and as XML files are generated, but will allow you to proceed without making any changes to your data.

eForms will automatically replace any non-standard quote or hyphen character with a CRA accepted character during XML creation; for example, eForms will replace an EM-Dash (long hyphen) with a standard hyphen. This preserves readability while ensuring compliance with the allowed character rules. However, any other character not on the accepted characters list above will prompt eForms to give you a warning, but will write the data to the XML file as it has been entered if you proceed.

What Should You Do?

The user has the choice of submitting the data as it exists, or manually re-writing the address only using valid characters. CRA may issue warnings about potentially invalid characters, but will usually allow you to proceed with the submission anyway. Even so, be aware that CRA may still reject the submission, at their discretion.