quotes - What's the accepted way of storing quoted data in XML?

Question

What's the accepted way of storing quoted data in XML?

For example, for a node, which is correct?

• (a) <name>Jesse "The Body" Ventura</name>
• (b) <name>Jesse "The Body" Ventura</name>
• (c) <name>Jesse &quot;The Body&quot; Ventura</name>
• (d) none of the above (please specify)

If (a), what do you do for attributes? If (c), is it really appropriate to mix HTML & XML? Similarly, how do you handle single and curly quotes?

Answer 1

Your correct answer is A & C as the " is not a character that must be encoded in element data.

You should always be XML encoding characters such as >, <, and & to ensure that you don't have issues if they are NOT inside a CDATA section. These are key items to be concerned about for element data.

When talking about attributes you have to then also be careful of ' and " inside attribute values depending on the type of symbol you use to surround the value.

I've found that often encoding " and ' is a better idea in all aspects as it helps at times when converting to other formats, where the " or ' might cause problems there as well.