How to Escape Ampersands in Xml So They Are Rendered as Entities in Html

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

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

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

How can I escape & in XML?

Use & in place of &.

Change it to:

<string name="magazine">Newspaper & Magazines</string>

escaping ampersands in XML

An ampersand may also be part of a numeric character reference, but that particular character () is not allowed in XML:

Character Range

[2] Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF]

Minor note: you mean well-formed, not valid. See Well-formed vs Valid XML.

What characters do I need to escape in XML documents?

If you use an appropriate class or library, they will do the escaping for you. Many XML issues are caused by string concatenation.

XML escape characters

There are only five:

"   "
'   '
<   <
>   >
&   &

Escaping characters depends on where the special character is used.

The examples can be validated at the W3C Markup Validation Service.

Text

The safe way is to escape all five characters in text. However, the three characters ", ' and > needn't be escaped in text:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>"'></valid>

Attributes

The safe way is to escape all five characters in attributes. However, the > character needn't be escaped in attributes:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute=">"/>

The ' character needn't be escaped in attributes if the quotes are ":

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute="'"/>

Likewise, the " needn't be escaped in attributes if the quotes are ':

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute='"'/>

Comments

All five special characters must not be escaped in comments:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>
<!-- "'<>& -->
</valid>

CDATA

All five special characters must not be escaped in CDATA sections:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>
<![CDATA["'<>&]]>
</valid>

Processing instructions

All five special characters must not be escaped in XML processing instructions:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?process <"'&> ?>
<valid/>

XML vs. HTML

HTML has its own set of escape codes which cover a lot more characters.

What is the use of & in XML?

& is simply the encoded version of the "&" (ampersand) character.

So yes, the entry you see represents the "&" character.

From W3C XML 1.0 Spec, section 2.4:

The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) must not appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters... If they are needed elsewhere, they must be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings " & " and " < " respectively.

Prevent re-encoding ampersands using Node's setTextContent method

Change the pre-processing to replace straight quotes with Unicode characters, not with invalid XML entities. Those entities are defined by HTML, and is not valid XML.

“ should be “ or \u201C if written as Java literal
” should be ” or \u201D if written as Java literal
‘ should be ‘ or \u2018 if written as Java literal
’ should be ’ or \u2019 if written as Java literal
' should be '