"Joe Fawcett" <joefawcett@n...> wrote in message 
news:esbc75wcJHA.5788@T......
>
>
> "Peter Olcott" <NoSpam@S...> wrote in message 
> news:84udnaQ2pqUWr_rUnZ2dnUVZ_r6dnZ2d@g......
>>
>> "Joe Fawcett" <joefawcett@h...> wrote in message 
>> news:gk72bp$en5$1@n......
>>>
>>>
>>> "Peter Olcott" <NoSpam@S...> wrote in message 
>>> news:v4ydnY_egMERcvjUnZ2dnUVZ_uOdnZ2d@g......
>>>> Is there any way to return XML from a SOAP call without 
>>>> the special characters such as "<" being encoded as 
>>>> &lt; ???
>>>>
>>> To be valid XML they have to encoded or within a CDATA 
>>> section, but that only applies to text within elements. 
>>> So if you were crafting your own service you could force 
>>> a CDATA section for the elements in question but 
>>> attribute values would still have to be encoded. I don't 
>>> know of any of the popular SOAP frameworks that allow 
>>> you to specify CDAT sections in their configuration.
>>
>> The system that we are using is gsoap.
>>
> Not one I've come across. But the fact is that either you 
> need non well-formed 'XML', in which case no 
> self-respecting system will do that, or you can use CDATA, 
> which is only a convenience anyway. No XML parser will 
> care whether you have: <data> 1 & l t ; 2</data> (spaces 
> for readability) or

None of several XML parsers are correctly parsing this form 
as XML, they are all parsing it as strings of text. In my 
case I have valid XML that is returned by a SOAP call. All 
of the special XML characters such as "<" and ">" are 
translated into &lt; and &gt; respectively, thus they are 
not recognized by the XML parsers as XML element brackets.

> <data><![CDATA[ 1 < 2 ]]></data>
> Strive to fix whatever system needs non well-formed XML to 
> operate or we'll end up with the same problems that beset 
> us with browsers that repair bad HTML.
>
> -- 
>
> Joe Fawcett (MVP - XML)
> http://joe.fawcett.name