XML documents and & char?

Question

Hi Girls and rest,

I have a question for XML document special chars, I'm using & in on of the value of the item in XML and TXMLDoc Delphi parser is complaining about it.

I search for some XML parsing options but none of them concerning special chars,

any ideas?

Example:

    <Configuration>
      <Configuration_item>  
        <view_name value="some view & name"/>

....

Regards, Mika

Answer 1

Use & to represent an ampersand. The reason you need to do this is because & is a special character in XML - specifically, the character used to indicate the start of an XML entity, which is used to specify characters in the content that would (ironically) otherwise be special/complex characters.

<view_name value="some view &amp; name"/>

Other common XML entities:

• " is "
• < is < (short for less-than)
• > is > (short for greater-than)

For more info:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/31/qanda.html

Answer 2

&, < and > are the special characters you'll want to watch out for, and within an attribute also ". & is kind of like the XML escape character.

They can be escaped thus:

• & => &
• < => <
• > => >
• " => "

(Actually, and oddly, you don't really need to escape > within an attribute, only <. Also, if you use ' instead of " for your attribute delimiters, instead of having to escape " as " you need to escape ' as '. See the AttValue reference in the XML specification for details.)

Answer 3

Dav and lavinio are right.

If you have a block of text with lots of special characters you might want to enclose it in CDATA instead.