org.w3c.dom.CDATASection Maven / Gradle / Ivy
/*
* Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,
*
* (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for
* Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This
* work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that
* it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
* warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
*
* [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
*/
package org.w3c.dom;
/**
* CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that
* would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is
* recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]>" string that ends the CDATA
* section. CDATA sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for
* including material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all
* the delimiters.
* The CharacterData.data attribute holds the text that is
* contained by the CDATA section. Note that this may contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and
* that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for
* serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part
* of a CDATA section.
*
The CDATASection interface inherits from the
* CharacterData interface through the Text
* interface. Adjacent CDATASection nodes are not merged by use
* of the normalize method of the Node interface.
*
No lexical check is done on the content of a CDATA section and it is
* therefore possible to have the character sequence "]]>"
* in the content, which is illegal in a CDATA section per section 2.7 of [XML 1.0]. The
* presence of this character sequence must generate a fatal error during
* serialization or the cdata section must be splitted before the
* serialization (see also the parameter "split-cdata-sections"
* in the DOMConfiguration interface).
*
Note: Because no markup is recognized within a
* CDATASection, character numeric references cannot be used as
* an escape mechanism when serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken
* when serializing a CDATASection with a character encoding
* where some of the contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to
* do so would not produce well-formed XML.
*
Note: One potential solution in the serialization process is to
* end the CDATA section before the character, output the character using a
* character reference or entity reference, and open a new CDATA section for
* any further characters in the text node. Note, however, that some code
* conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return an error or
* exception when a character is missing from the encoding, making the task
* of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization more difficult.
*
See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification.
*/
public interface CDATASection extends Text {
}