To Parse or Not to Parse: CDATA Explained

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July 01, 2010

To Parse or Not to Parse: CDATA Explained

By Michael Marr

To parse, or not to parse: that is the problem when your XML element values have characters that would otherwise be interpreted by an XML parser as syntax. However, we can use a special XML wrapper around our potentially dangerous text to solve this problem.

All the data in an XML document is initially considered PCDATA, or parsed character data. When interpreting a XML file, a parser will build the nodes by looking for a <element> tag to start an element, and a </element> to end the same element. In short, a parser is looking for the less than sign (<) to parse the text following it as an element name and attributes or the close of an element. After a element definition or closure finished, signified by the greater than sign (>), the parser will continue to look for another element and, if inside an existing element, the close of an element.

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