40
votes

I was looking at some xml files but didn't find the answer to my question: Can a XML element contain text and child elements at the same time?

For example:

<tree>
    <node1> 
      textTextText 
      <subnode1> text1 </subnode1>
      <subnode2> text2 </subnode2>
    </node1>
</tree>

I always see these kinds:

    <node2>
       <sub1> text </sub1>
    </node2>
2

2 Answers

47
votes

Yes. A parent node contains zero or more child nodes. Text nodes and element nodes are two kinds of nodes and an element node can have any number of text and/or element child nodes in any order. Schemas might restrict this, though. In fact, the whitespace between element nodes actually forms text node siblings. Usually this whitespace is ignored, though.

10
votes

Yes. It's called "mixed content".