Table of contents

Appendices

5.7 Text Nodes

Character data is grouped into text nodes. As much character data as possible is grouped into each text node: a text node never has an immediately following or preceding sibling that is a text node. The [string-value] of a text node is the character data. A text node always has at least one character of data.

Each character within a CDATA section is treated as character data. Thus, <![CDATA[<]]> in the source document will treated the same as <. Both will result in a single < character in a text node in the tree. Thus, a CDATA section is treated as if the <![CDATA[ and ]]> were removed and every occurrence of < and & were replaced by < and & respectively.

NOTE: 

When a text node that contains a < character is written out as XML, the < character must be escaped by, for example, using <, or including it in a CDATA section.

Characters inside comments, processing instructions and attribute values do not produce text nodes. Line-endings in external entities are normalized to #xA as specified in the XML Recommendation XML.

A text node does not have an [expanded-name] .