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Re: [xml-dev] Dangers of Copying Text into an XML Document

From: noah_mendelsohn@--.---.---
To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@-----.--->
Date: 9/5/2007 3:31:00 PM
Roger Costello writes:

> Can you think of other problems that may result from copying text from
> one document and pasting it into an XML document?

They might be characters that are not legal in XML at all.  See [1] which 
says:

"Well-formedness constraint: Legal Character

Characters referred to using character references MUST match the 
production for Char."

In XML 1.0 that's:

"Char      ::=          #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] |
                [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF]    /* any Unicode 
character, 
                                                           excluding the 
surrogate
                                                          blocks, FFFE, 
and FFFF. */" 

If you have any characters that don't fit this production, XML can't 
represent them, escaped or not.  XML 1.1 allows somewhat more, as I 
recall.

Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#wf-Legalchar

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------

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