Real World XML

CDATA Sections

As you know, XML processors are very sensitive to characters such as < and &. So what if you had a large section of text that contained a great many < and & characters that you didn't want to interpret as markup? You can escape those characters as &lt; and &amp;, of course—but with many such characters, that's awkward and hard to read. Instead, you can use a CDATA section.

CDATA sections hold character data that is supposed to remain unparsed by the XML processor. This is a useful asset to XML. Otherwise, all the text in an XML document is parsed and searched for characters such as < and &. You use CDATA sections simply to tell the XML processor to leave the enclosed text alone and pass it on unchanged to the underlying application. ...