How do I escape ampersands in XML so they are rendered as entities in HTML?

Question

I have some XML text that I wish to render in an HTML page. This text contains an ampersand, which I want to render in its entity representation: &.

Answer 1

When your XML contains &, this will result in the text &.

When you use that in HTML, that will be rendered as &.

Answer 2

How about using the unicode \u0026? Works for me in my android XML files. If problems arise, someone let me know.

Answer 3

I have tried &amp, but it didn't work. Based on Wim ten Brink's answer I tried &amp and it worked.

One of my fellow developers suggested me to use & and that worked regardless of how many times it may be rendered.

Answer 4

The & character is itself an escape character in XML so the solution is to concatenate it and a Unicode decimal equivalent for & thus ensuring that there are no XML parsing errors. That is, replace the character & with &.

Answer 5

Consider if your XML looks like below.

<Employees Id="1" Name="ABC">
  <Query>
    SELECT * FROM EMP WHERE ID=1 AND RES<>'GCF'
  <Query>
</Employees>

You cannot use the <> directly as it throws an error. In that case, you can use <> in replacement of that.

<Employees Id="1" Name="ABC">
  <Query>
    SELECT * FROM EMP WHERE ID=1 AND RES &#60;&#62; 'GCF'
  <Query>
</Employees>

Click here to see all the codes.

Answer 6

Use CDATA tags:

 <![CDATA[
   This is some text with ampersands & other funny characters. >>
 ]]>