Re: XML creation of iSeries UDB data - Characters that are not allowed.

["Douglas Handy" <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ann,

I was wondering if anyone could see where I am going wrong.  I have thought
> about scanning and replacing the 5 known characters that cause this
> error.  For example replace & with & works.  But I was hoping to convert
> the text to UNICODE and that solve the problem.  Thanks for any ideas.


It won't solve the problem because the ampersand has special significance in
XML tags, even if you are Unicode.  As others mentioned, the choices are to
use CTDATA or to encode it as & instead.  You would also have trouble if
any field contents included the less than character.  There are other
characters which are recommended to substitute as well, such as greater
than, but technically the ones which I believe interfere with XML parsing
are the ampersand and less than symbol.

One easy way to perform the substitution is to install the CGIDEV2 library
from IBM.  Among other things, it includes a service program called
CGISRVPGM2 which includes procedure Encode() which does this very task for
you.  It has a host of other useful stuff too.  See http://easy400.net for
more information.

Doug