Is it possible to have HTML text or CDATA inside an XML attribute?

Question

I keep getting "XML parser failure: Unterminated attribute" with my parser when I attempt to put HTML text or CDATA inside my XML attribute. Is there a way to do this or is this not allowed by the standard?

Answer 1

No, The markup denoting a CDATA Section is not permitted as the value of an attribute.

According to the specification, this prohibition is indirect rather than direct. The spec says that the Attribute value must not have an open angle bracket. Open angle brackets and ampersand must be escaped. Therefore you cannot insert a CDATA section. womp womp.

A CData Section is interpreted only when it is in a text node of an element.

Answer 2

Attributes can only have plain text inside, no tags, comments, or other structured data. You need to escape any special characters by using character entities. For example:

<code text="&lt;a href=&quot;/&quot;&gt;"> 

That would give the text attribute the value <a href="/">. Note that this is just plain text so if you wanted to treat it as HTML you'd have to run that string through an HTML parser yourself. The XML DOM wouldn't parse the text attribute for you.