XML Escape
Escapes or unescapes an XML string, replacing the five reserved characters with their corresponding XML entities.
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XML escaping explained
Why escape XML?
An XML parser treats < as the start of a tag and & as the start of an entity reference. If those characters appear literally, the document is not well-formed and every parser must reject it.
The five predefined entities
| Character | Entity |
|---|---|
' (apostrophe) |
' |
" (double quote) |
" |
& (ampersand) |
& |
< (less than) |
< |
> (greater than) |
> |
Unlike HTML, XML has no named entities for accented letters. Non-ASCII characters are written literally (usually UTF-8) or with numeric references.