Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

Bypassing Parsing with CDATA

There are times when you may want to include data in your document that contains markup, but which you do not want to be parsed. For example, if you were authoring a tutorial on HTML, and storing it in an XML file, you might have the following:

<instruction> 
Titles can be <I>italicized</I> using the <I> tag.
</instruction>

This instruction element could be used in an XML document as is; however, it would cause an error because the parser would assume that <I> was a new element. To denote that the content should not be parsed, you can utilize a CDATA Section.

CDATA Sections can occur anywhere character data can occur. They are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that would otherwise be recognized ...