How do I escape ampersands in XML so they are rendered as entities in HTML?

554
votes

I have some XML text that I wish to render in an HTML page. This text contains an ampersand, which I want to render in its entity representation: &.

How do I escape this ampersand in the source XML? I tried &, but this is decoded as the actual ampersand character (&), which is invalid in HTML.

So I want to escape it in such a way that it will be rendered as & in the web page that uses the XML output.

11
htmlxmlescapingampersand
The claim in the latest revision of this question that "the actual ampersand character (&) ... is invalid in HTML." is false. Indeed, even the accepted answer to the linked question provided as justification states "HTML5 allows you to leave it unescaped, but only when the data that follows does not look like a valid character reference". – Mark Amery

11 Answers

445
votes

When your XML contains &, this will result in the text &.

When you use that in HTML, that will be rendered as &.

203
votes

As per §2.4 of the XML 1.0 spec, you should be able to use &.

I tried & but this isn't allowed.

Are you sure it isn't a different issue? XML explicitly defines this as the way to escape ampersands.

141
votes

The & character is itself an escape character in XML so the solution is to concatenate it and a Unicode decimal equivalent for & thus ensuring that there are no XML parsing errors. That is, replace the character & with &.

77
votes

Use CDATA tags:

 <![CDATA[
   This is some text with ampersands & other funny characters. >>
 ]]>
47
votes

&amp; should work just fine, Wikipedia has a List of predefined entities in XML.

13
votes

In my case I had to change it to %26.

I needed to escape & in a URL. So &amp; did not work out for me. The urlencode function changes & to %26. This way neither XML nor the browser URL mechanism complained about the URL.

6
votes

I have tried &amp, but it didn't work. Based on Wim ten Brink's answer I tried &amp;amp and it worked.

One of my fellow developers suggested me to use &#x26; and that worked regardless of how many times it may be rendered.

5
votes

&amp; is the way to represent an ampersand in most sections of an XML document.

If you want to have XML displayed within HTML, you need to first create properly encoded XML (which involves changing & to &amp;) and then use that to create properly encoded HTML (which involves again changing & to &amp;). That results in:

&amp;amp;

For a more thorough explanation of XML encoding, see:

What characters do I need to escape in XML documents?

4
votes

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;&nbsp;</xsl:text> will do the trick.

3
votes

How about using the unicode \u0026? Works for me in my android XML files. If problems arise, someone let me know.

0
votes

Consider if your XML looks like below.

<Employees Id="1" Name="ABC">
  <Query>
    SELECT * FROM EMP WHERE ID=1 AND RES<>'GCF'
  <Query>
</Employees>

You cannot use the <> directly as it throws an error. In that case, you can use &#60;&#62; in replacement of that.

<Employees Id="1" Name="ABC">
  <Query>
    SELECT * FROM EMP WHERE ID=1 AND RES &#60;&#62; 'GCF'
  <Query>
</Employees>

Click here to see all the codes.