Use of '&' in element of XML Document

[John E. Simpson]

At 01:17 PM 07/27/1999 -0700, Mallikarjuna Sangappa wrote:
>How should the DTD be written to use & for an element
>in the XML Document?
>
>For example,
>
><!ELEMENT COMPANY_NAME (#PCDATA)>
>
><COMPANY_NAME>J & W AUTO BODY INC</COMPANY_NAME> does
>not become a well formed XML Document.

Include an entity declaration in the DTD, e.g.:
	<!ENTITY amp "&x0026;" >
Then in your example:
	<COMPANY_NAME>J &amp; W AUTO BODY INC</COMPANY_NAME>
(Note that if you're not using a DTD, you can use &amp; without declaring it.)

Or you can enclose the whole thing in a CDATA block:
	<COMPANY_NAME><![CDATA[J & W AUTO BODY INC]]></COMPANY_NAME>

The advantage of the second approach is that you don't need to worry about
entities. Its disadvantage is that it's more tedious to enter (if doing
your markup manually) and is also somewhat less readable.
==========================================================
John E. Simpson            | The secret of eternal youth
simpson at polaris.net        | is arrested development.
http://www.flixml.org      |  -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

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