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Working with CDATA Sections

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CDATA sections allow developers to include the markup characters <, >, and & within element content without using character or entity references. Scripts, style sheets, program code, and sample XML code are frequently contained in CDATA sections. The IXMLDOMCDATASection object behaves like a text node, but preserves knowledge of its special status, making it easy to preserve CDATA sections through multiple load-and-save cycles.

CDATA sections behave like text nodes, except that they cannot be used inside of attribute nodes. CDATA sections may be mixed with text nodes, entity references, and other content containers, and can appear as child nodes of elements, document fragments, entity references, and entities.

Examples

The following are script examples.

JScript

The following JScript fragment creates an element named <example> whose contents are protected by a CDATA section using the createCDATASection method of DOMDocument.

var demoElement=xmlDoc.createElement("example");
var demoContent=xmlDoc.createCDATASection("<sample>This is an element</sample>");
demoElement.appendChild(demoContent);

VBScript

Set demoElement=xmlDoc.createElement("example")
Set demoContent=xmlDoc.createCDATASection("<sample>This is an element</sample>")
demoElement.appendChild(demoContent)

CDATA sections also have an impact on MSXML white space handling.

For more information about properties and methods of IXMLDOMCDATASection, see the IXMLDOMCDATASection.