So I'm writing some XML generating code, and found that the following attribute value was screwing up the XML formatting:
"Jim/Bob"
So I looked into the XML Entities used as escape sequences and every list I saw did not include one for the forward slash. Am I missing something obvious here? Seems like the sort of thing you'd want to escape...
The forward slash is valid as is and does not need further encoding.
The only reserved characters are:
>
<
&
%
For even more XML entities - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
There's no predefined entity reference for it, but you can use a character reference: “/”.
However, you don't need to escape / for inclusion in XML. You might have to include it for inclusion in something else, for example a URI path part. But then you'd have to escape it for that format first; the application that picks up the URI wouldn't have any way to know if you'd encoded it in the XML or not.
I can't see why a value of "Jim/Bob" would need escaping or cause XML any problems at all.
You probably have a constrained attribute, as defined in the XML Schema.
I do not know what you mean by XML formatting.