C# 5.0 Programmer's Reference

Appendix V XML

This appendix summarizes useful XML topics and techniques.

Special Characters

The following table lists five special characters defined for use in XML files.

Character	Code
<	<
>	>
&	&
'	'
"	"

You can also include special characters inside CDATA sections. A CDATA section begins with <![CDATA[ and includes all the following text until it reaches the closing sequence ]]>. The CDATA can include carriage returns, ampersands, quotes, and other special characters.

Writing XML Data

The .NET Framework provides two main ways to write XML data: the XmlWriter class and the XML Document Object Model. The following two sections describe these approaches.

XmlWriter

The XmlWriter class provides methods for writing the pieces of an XML file. To use an XmlWriter to write XML data into a file, call the class’s Create method to create the file. Then use the other methods to write the pieces of the XML document into the file.

The following table lists the most useful XmlWriter methods.

Method	Purpose
Close	Closes the writer’s underlying stream.
Create	Creates an XmlWriter associated with a file, stream, StringBuilder, or other object.
Dispose	Frees the writer’s resources. (You can use the using statement to ensure that the writer is disposed.)
Flush	Flushes output to the underlying stream.
WriteAttributeString	Writes an attribute with a specified name and value.
WriteCData	Writes CDATA.
WriteComment	Writes a comment.
WriteElementString	Writes an element with a specified name ...