Special Characters

Forbidden Characters

here are four forbidden characters in XML. They can be used using their symbolic XML name.

Character Xml string
& "&"
< "&lt;"
> "&gt;"
" "&quot;"

Markup Characters Substitution

For readability reasons (especially when writting the data to process is XML) it can be useful to replace the markup characters '<' and '>' with another character, thus avoiding the use of < and > strings.This is done by setting the "infsup" XML attributes on the elements that own it. Setting infsup="[]" will, for instance, allow users to write '[' and ']' in the provtest file knowing that they will be interpreted as '<' and '>'.

Control Characters

The control characters like \n, \t, \r are not interpreted as control characters. In order to use control characters in provtest values, you must use their character number in UTF8 standard. The following table lists the most common control characters and their XML equivalent.

Character Xml string
\n "&#xD;"
\t "&#x9;"
\r "&#xA;"