Skip to Content
XQuery
book

XQuery

by Priscilla Walmsley
March 2007
Intermediate to advanced
512 pages
21h 15m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from XQuery

CDATA Sections

A CDATA section is a convenience used in XML documents that allows you to include literal text in element content without having to use < and & entity references to escape less-than and ampersand symbols, respectively. CDATA sections are not a separate kind of node; they are not represented in the XQuery data model at all.

CDATA sections are delimited by <![CDATA[ and ]]>. Example 21-12 shows two h1 elements. The first element has a CDATA section that contains some literal text, including an unescaped ampersand character. It also contains a reference to a <catalog> element that is intended to be taken as a string, not as an XML element in the document. If this text were not enclosed in a CDATA section, the XML element would not be well formed. The second h1 element shown in the example is equivalent, using predefined entities to escape the ampersand and less-than characters.

Example 21-12. Two equivalent h1 elements, one with a CDATA section

<h1><![CDATA[Catalog & Price List from <catalog>]]></h1>
<h1>Catalog &amp; Price List from &lt;catalog></h1>

When your query accesses an XML document that contains a CDATA section, the CDATA section is not retained. If the h1 element in Example 21-12 is queried, its content is Product Catalog & Price List from <catalog>. There is no way for the query processor to know that a CDATA section was used in the input document.

For convenience, CDATA sections can also be specified in a query, in the character data content of an ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

XQuery: The XML Query Language

XQuery: The XML Query Language

Michael Brundage
XQuery Kick Start

XQuery Kick Start

James McGovern, Per Bothner, Kurt Cagle, James Linn, Vaidyanathan Nagarajan
XSLT

XSLT

Doug Tidwell

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006349Errata