Understanding Escape Sequences in XML: A Comprehensive Guide

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XML escaped characters

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has a set of special characters that are used in its syntax.

As these characters are used to define XML components like elements or tags and in order for them to be correctly interpreted, they cannot be used in the XML file to represent data rather than markup of the XML file.

The solution to the above limitation is to use a special character reference as an alias instead of that actual character.

At build time, Advanced Installer will automatically perform the XML special characters escape for all the XML data specified in Edit XML File Dialog .

For example, if you add an existing XML file or create a new one in your project and insert a special XML character in one of its elements, let’s say < character, when you will build the project, Advanced Installer will automatically escape this character, replacing it with <. The result is that the XML document installed by the built package will contain the escaped character making possible the correct interpretation of the XML code.

XML special characters that get escaped at install time

Special character	escaped form	gets replaced by
Ampersand	&	&
Less-than	<	<
Greater-than	>	>
Quotes	"	“
Apostrophe	'	‘

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Understanding Escape Sequences in XML: A Comprehensive Guide