From: James Britt <james.britt@...>
Date: 2008-04-24T15:43:56+09:00
Subject: Re: REXML cannot handle apostrophes?

Bilyk, Alex wrote:
> I believe this is not valid XML. You'd need to covert single ' to "
> before you can use XML parsers to look at your format as XML.

Not true at all.  Attributes may use single or double quotes; you need 
to avoid the same quote character within the attribute value itself, or 
else use the correct entity instead of the literal.

REXML has a habit of slurping in XML, creating a node tree, and then 
using it's own desired set of quote marks for attributes when emitting 
text, even if that is not what you passed in as the raw text.

It also seems to do some unfortunate entity replacement, creating 
non-XML despite what it may have been given.


> Post your
> XML file some place like http://www.stg.brown.edu/service/xmlvalid/ and
> see if it's valid.

Valid and well-formed are two different things.  The issue seems to be a 
matter of well-formed XML.  That URL seems to be looking to validate XML 
against some DTD.

An easy way to check some XML is to load it into  Firefox or Internet 
Explorer.  They should yell if the markup is malformed.

Or use tidy.


-- 
James Britt

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