escaping special characters like & in android xml

Question

<string name="app_name">something & something</string>

gives an error. How can i escape this?

Is this correct

<string name="app_name">something &amp; something</string>

or is there a better way?

score 112 · Accepted Answer · edited May 11 '17 at 20:14

112

Try reading this page: http://www.xmlnews.org/docs/xml-basics.html it looks like it contains the answer you are looking for.

In summary, here is the list of escaped characters and the escape code

Character  Predeclared Entity
&          &amp;
<          &lt;
>          &gt;
"          &quot;
'          &apos;

Referenced from the link.

edited May 11 '17 at 20:14

robd

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answered Oct 24 '12 at 19:41

JoxTraex

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It would be better to at least quote the answer, so it's here. – Don Roby Oct 24 '12 at 19:42
Who wants to read xml documentation... I just want to read it all in one place, here on the stackoverflow :) – Renetik Aug 08 '20 at 05:30

score 15 · Answer 2 · answered May 14 '14 at 12:47

15

For me &quot ; didin't work so I used \"" and this character was escaped.

answered May 14 '14 at 12:47

user1252459

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I can see a whitespace in `&quot ;`. – Attacktive Jan 06 '15 at 04:12
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This escaping is for escaping XML files, not java. – JoxTraex Jan 20 '15 at 04:51
please explain how you used this to escape? just show us where you placed & – Muneef M Jul 10 '16 at 15:43

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 23 '20 at 10:06

Well in Android XML simply adding the Predeclared entities didn't work in my case, needed to add a backslash before it. So in order to escape something & something use:

<string name="app_name">something \&amp; something</string>

In the case of apostrophe and quotes simply using a backslash works too. Like for escaping something like "That's it" you can simply use:

<string name="demo">\"That\'s it\"</string>

instead of the usual

<string name="demo">\&quot;That\&apos;s it\&quot;</string>

Hope this will be of help when someone like me stumbles on this question.

escaping special characters like & in android xml

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