Re: Binary data in XML documents

[Ginés Gómez <gi...@worldonline.es>]

Hi,
  I found the same problem including URL's in output XML documents. Some 
URL's had a & character that is considered a reference in XML so it 
didn't work. The problem was solved by declaring the node a CDATA.

Hope it helps
Bye

Sean Kelly wrote:

> Folks:
> 
> I'm working on a project that returns an XML document as the result of a
> query.  Sometimes, we want to return a small binary object, like an image or
> a sound bite, in the document.  As an example:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE result ...>
> <result>
>   <name>John Q. Public</name>
>   <phone>+1 234 567 8900</phone>
>   <portrait>...</portrait>
> </result>
> 
> where the <portrait> tag in this case would contain some binary data.
> Normally, we'd just put the URL to a portrait in there, but often the binary
> data lives somewhere that's not HTTP accessible.
> 
> I'm curious to know how other people have encoded binary data in XML
> documents.  Anyone?
> 
> One thought is that we'd base-64 encode it to make sure it consists of just
> printable ASCII characters.  But then I remembered that we're using UTF-8
> ....why not use that richer character set to get a more compact encoding?
> And then I remembered that XML can use the entity mechanism to encode all
> sorts of uncommon characters.
> 
> So, just for fun, I used the Xerces 1.2.0 serializer to output a document
> containing a JPG image as the text child of its only element (yeah, call me
> insane).  I got something like this out of the serializer:
> 
> <tag>&#0;&#16;...
> 
> But if I try to parse this document, I get a fatal SAX exception:
> 
> Character reference "&#0;" is an invalid XML character.
> 
> How can it be invalid if Xerces's own serializer generated it?
> 
> Thanks.
> --Sean
> 
> 
> 
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