Is this a valid XML file?

Question

Hello everyone,

I need to send some XML element to some other services and I want to ensure my XML file is of elegant format so that other people could use their XML parser to parse the XML file.

For such kinds of XML file, is it elegant format, breaking any rules of XML? Not sure whether &#x4 is valid XML character sequences in .Net/C#?

I am confused about whether strings starts with $#x are all valid? If not all of them are valid, any ways to filter them out?

I am using VSTS 2008 + C# + .Net 3.5.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Text>&#x4;</Text>

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

No. Character references must be terminated with semi-colons.

Update: Given that syntax error in the question has been corrected, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#dt-charref for a description of what values are acceptable.

Frankly, I'd stick to UTF-8 for everything except ", <, > and &. It makes the XML itself more readable.

Answer 2

Use XML Validator. It shows the following error:

Error: Character reference must end with the ';' delimiter.

Answer 3

As others have suggested, there was a semi-colon missing, and use the validator. But also note that not all characters are legal, even if the input format is technically OK.

The following document if failed by the validator:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Text>&#x4;</Text>

This one does validate:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Text>&#x32;</Text>

For information on characters to use or avoid, this seems interesting.