XML Escape / Unescape

Text that goes into an XML document — a feed title, a SOAP field, a configuration value, an SVG label — must not contain a raw & or <, and inside attribute values the quotes and line breaks need care too. This tool escapes text for element content or for attribute values, can turn non-ASCII characters into &#…; references, wraps text in a CDATA section that survives "]]>", and decodes escaped XML back into plain text.

How to use this tool

1. Paste the text or the escaped XML.
2. Choose Escape, Unescape or CDATA.
3. For escaping, say whether the text goes between tags or inside an attribute value, and how to write non-ASCII characters.
4. Copy the result.

Formula

& → &amp; · < → &lt; · > → &gt; · " → &quot; · ' → &apos; (attributes) · line break in an attribute → &#10;

XML 1.0 requires & and < to be escaped everywhere; > only after ]] but escaping it is always safe. In attribute values the quote that delimits the value must be escaped, and literal tabs and line breaks are turned into spaces by every parser, so they are written as references. Characters XML 1.0 forbids (most control characters, U+FFFE, U+FFFF) cannot be written at all, not even as &#…;, so they are removed or reported. Unescaping decodes the five XML entities and all numeric references in one pass; HTML names are optional.

Example

The sample Tom & Jerry's "Best" <Episodes> — 5 > 3 escaped for element content becomes Tom &amp;amp; Jerry's "Best" &amp;lt;Episodes&amp;gt; — 5 &amp;gt; 3 (4 characters escaped). For an attribute value the quotes become &amp;quot; and the apostrophe &amp;apos; as well. Wrapping a]]>b in CDATA gives <![CDATA[a]]]]><![CDATA[>b]]>.