writing some characters like '<' in an xml file

Question

since the beginning of my programmation, I used some special character like "<-", ""<<" im my string.xml in Eclipse while developping for Android.

All worked fine for one year, but today, i just wanted to make some minor changes and began to edit my xml files.

I get now compilation error on these characters because eclipse believe it's part of the xml blocks.

Any idea on how I could add this symbol "<" in my xml files?

Thank a lot.

You mean xml escaping < = < etc.? Or something more complicated? — Rup, Jul 02 '10 at 15:13

score 306 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 07 '16 at 19:48

306

Use

< for <

> for >

& for &

edited Jul 07 '16 at 19:48

Hussein El Feky

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answered Jul 02 '10 at 15:13

reece

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Thank you... I feel stupid because I wal looking for "bigger than" because of my bad english... After a search on greater than , I found my answer.. Thank a lot btw. – Waza_Be Jul 02 '10 at 15:21
2

They're XML character entities. XML doesn't support all of the entities that HTML does. – Tanner Swett Jul 07 '16 at 19:53
what's for $ (dollar sign)? – Bugs Happen Apr 11 '19 at 12:58

score 27 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

27

Another way to insert special character follow Moss guide: How can I write character & in android strings.xml by used Unicode definition:

Example:

<string name="item_unknown">\u003c Item Unknown \u003e</string>

which present in string :

< Item Unknown >

edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

Community

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answered Nov 23 '10 at 07:45

NguyenDat

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Best answer to solve the problem < and > on android axml since &lt and &gt still not recognized as valid token – jace Jan 05 '18 at 02:48
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That solution worked for me much better than above one. Thanks! – Radzik Jun 12 '18 at 10:06

Xebozone · Answer 3 · 2015-12-08T04:20:20.263

I stumbled upon this question, as I use HTML markup in my strings.

If you refer to the Android String Resources documentation, in the section: "Styling with HTML markup" you will see that in strings.xml, you need to use &amplt; for an opening bracket, but you can safely use backslash and a closing bracket. For example:

<b>Text</b>

can be written as:

&lt;b>Text&lt;/b>

in your strings.xml.

If using this HTML string in your code, you can use:

Html.fromHtml( getResources().getString(R.string.yourHTMLString )

and the output will be your bold string!

writing some characters like '<' in an xml file

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