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Re: Parsing Input Data for well-formedness

Subject: Re: Parsing Input Data for well-formedness
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2001 14:40:50 -0400
Re:  Parsing Input Data for well-formedness
Marty,

The only characters you need to worry about are '&' and '<'. XML is deliberately put together this way.

Why are double escapings a problem? you just have to find, and escape, any '&' or '<' that is not a markup delimiter.

How bad the problem is depends on what's coming in. If it's well-formed XML (which you've said it isn't, I know), all '&' and '<' are markup delimiters except those in CDATA marked sections. If it's plain text, none of them will be markup delimiters since there's no markup. If it's something else, things get trickier. HTML would be such a format, or non-well-formed pseudo-XML fragments. In this case, you need to know not only what you want from these characters (that's pretty easy: &amp; or &lt;), but also what you want to happen to your markup (and how you tell it's markup).

Which of these do you have?

Cheers,
Wendell

At 01:45 PM 10/9/01, you wrote:
When building an XML file from external data, we need to validate that each
input string is well-formed.  The specific situation is a Loan Type field
which returns "A&D".  Before we populate our XML file, we need to convert
this to "A&amp;D".  Otherwise the XSLT will complain and not render the
final page.

Before we build a utility class for checking/correcting these (all?!?) input
strings, i have to ask the obvious -- has anyone already created something
like this?  Certainly there are many other characters we will need to
consider, and we'll have to watch out for double-escaping things
(A&amp;amp;D).

Must i reinvent this wheel?


======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
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