Troubleshooting - Report Export to Excel Issue

I’m currently having issues exporting the Tickets Open Per Region to an Excel sheet.
 
Please let me know if there’s something I need to do on my end, I typically pull this report a few times a day and have never had issues, thanks.

Tailing the logs while replicating the issue revealed the following:

Caused by: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 5975; columnNumber: 38; An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x0) was found in the element content of the document.
        at org.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(Unknown Source)
        at org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(Unknown Source)
        at groovy.util.XmlParser.parse(XmlParser.java:175)
        at groovy.util.XmlParser.parseText(XmlParser.java:208)
        at groovy.util.XmlParser$parseText.call(Unknown Source)

So we know there is an invalid character in the export of the report, now how to we find it in such a large report?

Sam's approach was to:

1. Update the report to return a different value to Null - This unfortunately didn't fix the issue.
2. Start stripping out each report column to see when the issue was resolved - This pin-pointed the “Update for Carrier” field of the report.
3. Bring the report data into excel and try to find the strange character in that column - here is a regex that was used in this case

   [^\w, \n-:>@\]\[ ;?=–]

This lead to the conclusion that the field 'Update for carrier' on the Das NOC form for ticket 1654370 has characters that are not supported by the Export tool:

Fixing the form field value should resolve the issue! Be sure to ask for the customer's permission to make any form changes on prod - the customer may want to do this themselves.