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Re: newline/form feed valid as attribute value?

• From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:51:40 -0300

At 2012-07-02 20:48 +0200, Dan Shelton wrote:
>Does anyone here know whether newlines, form feed or vertical feed are
>valid within an attribute value (I hope not, otherwise it would make
>it a lot harder to write a fast xml parser using regex alone)?

A naked newline (or any other line ending sequence normalized to a 
naked newline) in an attribute value is converted to a space:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#AVNormalize

Tab and carriage return are the only other control characters allowed 
in XML 1.0:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#NT-Char

If you want all other control characters except NUL, use XML 1.1:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#NT-Char

For a client of mine who needed to feed a legacy print application I 
had to write one of my stylesheet fragments in XML 1.1 in order to 
get the control characters they needed:

   http://sportsmlt.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/sportsmlt/2.0/support/sportsmlt2-character.xsl?revision=13&view=markup

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . Ken


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• References:
  • newline/form feed valid as attribute value?
    • From: Dan Shelton <dan.f.shelton@gmail.com>