Expressing markup in Java XML property files: CDATA vs. escaped tags

Question

I am reading and writing Java Properties files in XML format. Many of the property value have HTML embedded, which developers wrap in [[CDATA elements like so:

<entry key="foo"><![CDATA[
    <b>bar</b>
]]></entry>

However, when I use the Java API to load these properties and later write them back to XML, it doesn't wrap these entries in CDATA elements, but rather escapes the tags, like so:

<entry key="foo">&lt;b&gt;bar&lt;/b&gt;</entry>

Are these two formats equivalent? Am I introducing any potential problems by replacing CDATA with escaped tags?

Answer 1

Not equivalent, but the text value you get by calling getText() is the same.

However, I would suggest you to abandon Properties in favor of real XML parsed by JAXB - it's awesome, you'll like it.

Didn't found any nice one, so at least these:

Object -> XML: here

Sun's verbose tutorial: http://java.sun.com/webservices/docs/2.0/tutorial/doc/JAXBUsing.html

Answer 2

Yes you could be inducing some problems, depending on how the data is used.

For example if you use it in a HTML page, A<br>B will print as

A

B

But A<br>B will show as

A<br>B

Answer 3

When the files are loaded into memory in a Properties object there is no difference between the two formats you have shown, as Ondra Žižka an answer with. CDATA sections are a way to escape a block of text instead of escaping every character in it.

I would consider the non-xml property file format myself, you will continue to see the tags in the raw files, but newline characters would need to be escaped.