Delphi and XML - XML Syntax

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It is worth know a few details about this language before we discuss how to use it in Delphi:

• You can add comments within <!—andmarkers, which are basically ignored by XML processors. There are also directives and processing instructions, enclosed within <? and ?> markers.
  

• White spaces are generally ignored. While human beings must be able to read your XML tags, your applications won't care much about them.
  

• There are a few reserved characters that you cannot use in the text. The only three characters you can never use are the less-than character (or the left angle bracket, <, used to delimit a marker), which is replaced by &lt;,  the greater-than character, which is replaced by &gt;, and the ampersand character (&), which is replaced by &amp;. Other optional special characters are &apos; for the single quote(‘), and &quot; for the double quote(").
  

• To add non XML content (for example, binary information or a script), you can use a CDATA section, enclosed within <![CDATA [and]]>.
  

• All markers are enclosed by angle brackets, < and >. Markers (or tags) are case sensitive.

• For each opening marker there must be a matching closing marker denoted by a initial slash character: <node>value</node>

• Markers must not overlap; they must be properly nested.

• If a marker has no content (but is needed), you can replace the opening and closing markers with a single marker that includes a trailing slash:<node/>

• Markers can have attributes, using multiple embedded tags and only one block of text representing the value of the node. XML nodes can have either a textual value or embedded tags, but not both.

• A node can have multiple child nodes with the same tag; tags do not have to be unique. Attributes, however, have to be unique for each node.

It is worth adding that an XML document needs to be well-formed if it is to be used in web browsers or other applications. There are a few extra rules that need to be followed for XML documents to be consideredsyntactically correct. So let’s look at what is meant by syntactically correct:

• Each XML document must indicate that it is an XML document, which version of XML it complies with, and finally, what type of character encoding it takes:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

• Encodings can include Unicode character sets such as UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 and also some ISO encodings such as ISO-1064-xxx or ISO-8859-xxx. The prologue can also include external declarations, the schema used to validate the document, namespace declaration and associated XSL file, and some internal entity declarations.

• A well-formed XML document will have no problems being loaded into a web browser or any other XML-compliant application.

Next: Using XML with Delphi >>
 

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