Joe Cox (jcox@k...) wrote:
: I am relatively new to XML. I built a website using XML to transfer query 
: results to web browsers. Everything was working and I was doing final 
: testing before deploying it, but ran into an XML problem.

: I got the following error:


:   Whitespace is not allowed at this location. Error processing resource 
: 'http://compass/cgi-bin/keyword_search.php'. Line 15...

:   <name>CO & CO</name>
: ------------^


: 'CO & CO' is a string that represents the name of a company that was fed out 
: of the database as part of a query result. My PHP code builds it into XML

(not quite)

: Apparently, XML doesn't like to see an '&' between it's tags. I though XML 
: ignored everything between tags, so why does it snag on this?

No.  Various things must be escaped, most obviously > by using &gt;

"&" itself must therefore also be escaped, by using &amp;

(To ensure no misunderstanding, the above escapes, with each character 
quoted)

	"&"  "g"  "t"  ";"

	"&"  "a"  "m"  "p"  ";"


 Is there a 
: simple fix to this or must I go back and write exception code to handle 
: these?

When you generate the XML you must escape various things.  I'm sure there
are XML libraries for PHP that make it easy to generate valid XML from
arbitrary input, but I don't know any names off hand.




--

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