Is anyone using CDATA?

[David Megginson]

Parik Rao writes:

 > Anyone have experiences with CDATA ?  We're interested in inserting
 > non-XML markup and BLOBs into XML files, and the best way seems to be
 > CDATA.  However, some of the parsers I've been playing around with
 > (Microsoft, XMLint) don't support the CDATA element.  Is CDATA handling
 > required for a validating parser?

I, at least, cannot reproduce your bug -- with MSXML, the following
document parses exactly as expected:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<listing>
<![CDATA[<a></a>]]>
</listing>

That said, CDATA marked sections won't always work for you -- BLOBs
are likely to contain non-SGML characters, and any arbitrary non-XML
markup containing ']]>' will kill the marked section.  The best way to
include arbitrary non-XML information in a document is to include it
as an unparsed entity or an HREF link (just as you would include a GIF
in an HTML page).


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117 at freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins at microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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