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Microsoft Word Applied xml a toolkit for Programmers Wiley docBog'liq Ceponkus, Hoodbhoy - Applied XML - Toolkit for ProgrammersCharacter Data Sections
When we talked about entity references, we mentioned that there was more than one
way to fix the problem of the parser getting confused by content containing illegal
characters or non-well formed syntax. One way to duck past the watchful eye of the
parser is to make the parser simply assume that your content is nothing more than
character data by dumping that information into a character data
(CDATA) section
(hence
the name!). Think of the CDATA section as a cover under which contraband material
(content containing characters that would otherwise cause non-well formed syntax errors)
can be smuggled across customs (the XML parser).
Let’s look at our original problem. We want to declare that Faraz is shorter than Alex
using simple, standard math symbols. Unfortunately, the parser gets upset when we use
the < character. Well, let’s simply toss our errant statement into a CDATA section. Then,
our XML snippet would look like this:
The parser would then be tricked into ignoring the content of the CDATA section and
simply reproducing it as:
Faraz < Alex
Again, this is precisely what we wanted it to look like.
Another example of using CDATA sections is to encode markup itself. Say your XML
document contains information on how to create HTML pages. In that case, you’re going
to want to include a lot of markup sections in the document that you would want
displayed as markup. Let’s say you want to tell a reader how to create a div element
within a span element in your HTML. Here’s how you could include that information in
your XML document such that it wouldn’t throw the parser:
Here is how to put a "Div" into a "Span" :
contents of my_div
]]>
Figure 3.8 displays what the parser spits out when it sees the above snippet.Generically,
CDATA sections are expressed as follows:
as
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