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    XML Syntax

    Uploaded by

    pulkit Garg

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    XML Syntax

    Uploaded by

    pulkit Garg
    27 views3 pages

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    © © All Rights Reserved

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    27 views3 pages

    XML Syntax

    Uploaded by

    pulkit Garg

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 3

    XML - SYNTAX

    http://www.tutorialspoint.com/xml/xml_syntax.htm Copyright © tutorialspoint.com

    This chapter takes you through the simple syntax rules to write an XML document. Following is a
    complete XML document:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <contact-info>
    <name>Tanmay Patil</name>
    <company>TutorialsPoint</company>
    <phone>(011) 123-4567</phone>
    </contact-info>

    You can notice there are two kinds of information in the above example:

    markup, like <contact-info> and


    the text, or the character data, Tutorials Point and 040 123-4567.

    The following diagram depicts the syntax rules to write different types of markup and text in an
    XML document.

    Let us see each component of the above diagram in detail:

    XML Declaration
    The XML document can optionally have an XML declaration. It is written as below:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

    Where version is the XML version and encoding specifies the character encoding used in the
    document.

    Syntax Rules for XML declaration


    The XML declaration is case sensitive and must begin with "<?xml>" where "xml" is written in
    lower-case.

    If document contains XML declaration, then it strictly needs to be the first statement of the
    XML document.

    The XML declaration strictly needs be the first statement in the XML document.
    An HTTP protocol can override the value of encoding that you put in the XML declaration.

    Tags and Elements


    An XML file is structured by several XML-elements, also called XML-nodes or XML-tags. XML-
    elements' names are enclosed by triangular brackets < > as shown below:

    <element>

    Syntax Rules for Tags and Elements


    Element Syntax: Each XML-element needs to be closed either with start or with end elements as
    shown below:

    <element>....</element>

    or in simple-cases, just this way:

    <element/>

    Nesting of elements: An XML-element can contain multiple XML-elements as its children, but the
    children elements must not overlap. i.e., an end tag of an element must have the same name as
    that of the most recent unmatched start tag.

    Following example shows incorrect nested tags:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <contact-info>
    <company>TutorialsPoint
    <contact-info>
    </company>

    Following example shows correct nested tags:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <contact-info>
    <company>TutorialsPoint</company>
    <contact-info>

    Root element: An XML document can have only one root element. For example, following is not a
    correct XML document, because both the x and y elements occur at the top level without a root
    element:

    <x>...</x>
    <y>...</y>

    The following example shows a correctly formed XML document:

    <root>
    <x>...</x>
    <y>...</y>
    </root>

    Case sensitivity: The names of XML-elements are case-sensitive. That means the name of the
    start and the end elements need to be exactly in the same case.

    For example <contact-info> is different from <Contact-Info>.

    Attributes
    An attribute specifies a single property for the element, using a name/value pair. An XML-
    element can have one or more attributes. For example:
    <a href="http://www.tutorialspoint.com/">Tutorialspoint!</a>

    Here href is the attribute name and http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ is attribute value.

    Syntax Rules for XML Attributes


    Attribute names in XML unlikeHTML are case sensitive. That is, HREF and href are considered
    two different XML attributes.
    Same attribute cannot have two values in a syntax. The following example shows incorrect
    syntax because the attribute b is specified twice:

    <a b="x" c="y" b="z">....</a>

    Attribute names are defined without quotation marks, whereas attribute values must always
    appear in quotation marks. Following example demonstrates incorrect xml syntax:

    <a b=x>....</a>

    In the above syntax, the attribute value is not defined in quotation marks.

    XML References
    References usually allow you to add or include additional text or markup in an XML document.
    References always begin with the symbol "&" ,which is a reserved character and end with the
    symbol ";". XML has two types of references:

    Entity References: An entity reference contains a name between the start and the end
    delimiters. For example &amp; where amp is name. The name refers to a predefined string of text
    and/or markup.

    Character References: These contain references, such as &#65;, contains a hash mark “#”
    followed by a number. The number always refers to the Unicode code of a character. In this case,
    65 refers to alphabet "A".

    XML Text
    The names of XML-elements and XML-attributes are case-sensitive, which means the name
    of start and end elements need to be written in the same case.
    To avoid character encoding problems, all XML files should be saved as Unicode UTF-8 or
    UTF-16 files.
    Whitespace characters like blanks, tabs and line-breaks between XML-elements and between
    the XML-attributes will be ignored.
    Some characters are reserved by the XML syntax itself. Hence, they cannot be used directly.
    To use them, some replacement-entities are used, which are listed below:

    not allowed character replacement-entity character description

    < &lt; less than

    > &gt; greater than

    & &amp; ampersand

    ' &apos; apostrophe

    " &quot; quotation mark

    Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/jax.js

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