Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of CDATA Syntax in XML

Timestamp:

06/30/11 21:26:29 (15 years ago)

Author:

stachnik

Comment:

--

CDATA Syntax in XML

@@ +1 @@
+
+Elements that contain data of type xs:string may need to be escaped to prevent the xml parser from getting confused. How best to do this depends on the encoding of the string.
+
+== ASCII ==
+
+If the string is guaranteed to only contain characters from the ASCII character set then it needs to be escaped only if it contains the characters <, & or > (> is normally OK except under confusing circumstances so it's probably best to escape it anyway). A CDATA declaration has the form:
+
+{{{
+<![CDATA[some_string_goes_here]]>
+}}}
+
+This will escape any ASCII string except for ones that contain the substring ]]> since this would otherwise be the close delimiter. To escape such strings one can perform a global search and replace:
+
+{{{
+s/]]>/]]]]><![CDATA[>/g
+}}}
+
+Which splits the substring between two CDATA tags, thus allowing it to be escaped. CDATA elements get ignored by conforming XML parsers so such a string transformation won't effect what gets read in by the parser.
+
+== Unicode ==
+
+Unfortunately Unicode is more complicated to handle. If we need to deal with this we might want to consider using an external library.