FOAK: XML problem

I have to hand-carve some XML. It's produced by a tool that encodes some
of it in UTF-8, but ignores some international characters. No biggie,
I'm replacing those with the appropriate UTF codes.

I'm struggling slightly (and getting conflicting advice) on what do with
ampersands, <, >, carriage-returns and line-feed contained within a
(free-text) item in the file.

I've tried a few combinations, but my validation tool keeps barfing on
an "Invalid character" error. And this was needed yesterday.

Hay-ulllp!

 

This no good then? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Escaping

I thought that &lt &gt etc. worked?

 

There are escaping conventions for this kind of stuff:

< = &lt;

& = &amp;

line break can be represented as #xD #xA if you need to.

There should be a function available in your language libraries to do
this, to be honest.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Simon Wilson

So did I. And they do.

The stupid fucking validation tool I was using allows you to edit the
file, but still runs validation against the un-changed version.

Genius.

Thanks.

 

If you really are hand carving a one off, this free tool might have
speeded up the process if there was a large chunk of text with many
characters to be escaped.

http://www.myxmltools.com/xml-escape-tool.shtml
--
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There should, but they don't fucking work. Don't ask. Just... don't.

 

<!--[CDATA[ text ]]--> is what you are looking for, methinks.

 

Aye, that's the proper way of doing it in XML.

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_cdata.asp

For a noddy explanation.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Ben

Ahah! Noddy is good. Thanks.

 

Not really. They are HTML entity characters, nothing to do with XML -
what is happening is the XML parser (in your browser, or however you
are opening the file) is reading them as part of the markup.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Champ

Noted, ta.