What are invalid characters in XML

Question

I am working with some XML that holds strings like:

This is a string

Some of the strings that I am passing to the

Answer 1

In summary, valid characters in the text are:

• tab, line-feed and carriage-return.
• all non-control characters are valid except & and <.
• > is not valid if following ]].

Sections 2.2 and 2.4 of the XML specification provide the answer in detail:

Characters

Legal characters are tab, carriage return, line feed, and the legal characters of Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646

Character data

The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) must not appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they must be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings " & " and " < " respectively. The right angle bracket (>) may be represented using the string " > ", and must, for compatibility, be escaped using either " > " or a character reference when it appears in the string " ]]> " in content, when that string is not marking the end of a CDATA section.