Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Entry 1723

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Entry 1723

Invalid characters in XML tags?

If anyone knows the answer to this please tell me. What characters are illegal in XML tags? In my XML parser (which I now plan on finishing again thanks to PYX), for simplicity I want to have a tag be directly available in a data structure, as in $xml["tag"], and have any attributes of the "tag" tag be available as something like $xml["tag:attribute"]. The problem is ":" isn't illegal... well, technically it's illegal in a tag because it's the namespace separator.

In any case, I won't be able to separate tags and attributes by a colon. How's a semicolon? Or is anything wrong with just using a space?

Permalink | 3 Comments | id 1723

03:13 (utc-5)

Comments

Specs on tag names:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006

You can start a tag with a letter or _ or :, and after that you can use letters, numbers, certain UNICODE characters, or the punctuation .-_:

A semicolon or comma or space would be illegal in a tag name, so I guess they'd be OK for your syntax.

∴ Adam Vandenberg | 27-Mar-2002 3:41am est | http://flangy.com | #155

Wow, I didn't realize a period is allowed. A period would have been nice to use, though I didn't think of it. Thanks a bunch Adam. I'll use a space

By the way, you pointed to the spec... here's the actual BNF for the opening tag (http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006#dt-stag).

Adam Vandenberg wrote:

Whoops. I /meant/ to post to the BNF for names, but I was using a browser that didn't update the URL bar when an anchor was follwed.

∴ Adam Vandenberg | 27-Mar-2002 4:06pm est | #158

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