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General Rules for Coding XML Documents
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml-stylesheet ...?> <!DOCTYPE top-elem-name> <top-elem-name ...> ... </top-elem-name>
General rules for coding XML-based feeds
- Certain special characters need to be escaped to avoid having the code interpreted as a delimiter or other special meaning:
- escape all ampersand (
&
) characters - escape all ampersands with
&
to prevent them from being interpreted as XML character entities - escape all less than (
<
) symbols - escape all
<
symbols with<
to prevent them from being interpreted as the starting delimiter of an XML tag - escape all greater than (
>
) symbols - escape all
>
symbols with>
to prevent them from being interpreted as the ending delimiter of an XML tag - escape double quotes (
"
) within double-quoted attributes - escape double quotes in attributes as
"
- escape apostrophes (
'
) within single-quoted attributes - escape apostrophes (single quotes) in attributes as
&apost;
- escape special characters
- escape other special characters using the appropriate decimal character code (
&#nnn;
) or hexadecimal character code (&#xnnnn;
). For example, code a non-breaking space as either 
or 
(not
).
- escape all ampersand (