Pound symbol (£) in XML

[Jez]

I'm writing some text to an XML file on the ebase server via a custom resource.

It all gets very upset if I try and write a pound (£) symbol to the XML

From what I've read and been told, this is quite normal and the proper way to do this is to actually replae the £ symbol with the following string (please ignor spaces in the following code!);

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& #163;

The XML then displays the pound symbol when you open it in a browser (or combine it with a friendly Style Sheet). I've tried this by manually hacking the XML and it works just fine (as it does above on this forum if I don't put the space in!!!)

The problem I have is that when I try and write the & #163; string to the XML file, something is converting the ampersand to the string & I then end up with the following string in the XML file that's written to the server;

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£

This totally scuppers my attempts to produce the pound symbol as when viewed through a browser it comes out as & #163; and not £

Anyone have any ideas for how I can get round this?

Thanks

[AJDulk]

Rather than using #163, use the word pound. The reason is that it degrades better, i.e. if someone is using a browser that does not support the ampersand notation, they still understand the word where they do not understand the number. Funnily enough, this forum does not like the £ notation (at least in preview).

You can do the same for the Euro sign (i.e. €)

Of course, this does not sort your problem out with Ebase encoding the ampersand sign.

Regards,
Antony

[Joost]

It all gets very upset if I try and write a pound (£) symbol to the XML [...] Anyone have any ideas for how I can get round this?

I suppose you should somehow use CDATA to tell XML or it's parser it should handle the data as-is. I have not tried it with a custom resource though. I currently use it in a velocity script to create XML on the fly and write it to a DB clob.

More info on CDATA at: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_cdata.asp