I've stumbled in a problem handling the \line-feed and \carriage-return characters in xml.
I know that, according to http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-line-ends, xml processors are required to replace any "\n\r" or lone "\r" sequences with "\n".
The specification states that this has to be the behaviour for handling any "external parsed entity", does this apply to CDATA sections inside of an element as well?
thank you,
Michele
I'm sure that msxml library for example converts every \n\r" or lone "\r" sequences to "\n", regardless of their being in a cdata section or not.
I'll quote a sentence from the section you link to (emphasis mine):
To simplify the tasks of applications,
the XML processor must behave as if it
normalized all line breaks in external
parsed entities (including the
document entity) on input, before
parsing, by translating both the
two-character sequence #xD #xA and any #xD
that is not followed by #xA to a single #xA character.
Because the XML processor does this before parsing, it doesn't know yet which parts of the document are CDATA sections. Therefore, it will do the replacement regardless of the characters being in a CDATA section or not.
To reliably preserve these characters, they have to be written to the XML document as 
 and 
 entities.
Yes - "\n\r" or "\r" in CDATA sections must be replaced with "\n" for a processor to be conforming. Any CDATA sections in your XML document will be part of the document entity, which is 'parsed'. You can find an example of an unparsed entity here.
