XML

Introduction

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language and is a text-based markup language derived from Standard
Generalized Markup Language (SGML). This tutorial will teach you the basics of XML. The tutorial is divided
into sections such as XML Basics, Advanced XML, and XML tools. Each of these sections contain related topics
with simple and useful examples.

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is a text-based markup language derived from Standard
Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
XML tags identify the data and are used to store and organize the data, rather than specifying how to display
it like HTML tags, which are used to display the data. XML is not going to replace HTML in the near future, but
it introduces new possibilities by adopting many successful features of HTML.
There are three important characteristics of XML that make it useful in a variety of systems and solutions −
 XML is extensible − XML allows you to create your own self-descriptive tags, or language, that suits
your application.
 XML carries the data, does not present it − XML allows you to store the data irrespective of how it
will be presented.
 XML is a public standard − XML was developed by an organization called the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) and is available as an open standard.

XML Usage

A short list of XML usage says it all −

 XML can work behind the scene to simplify the creation of HTML documents for large web sites.
 XML can be used to exchange the information between organizations and systems.
 XML can be used for offloading and reloading of databases.
 XML can be used to store and arrange the data, which can customize your data handling needs.
 XML can easily be merged with style sheets to create almost any desired output.
 Virtually, any type of data can be expressed as an XML document.

What is Markup?

XML is a markup language that defines set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-
readable and machine-readable. So what exactly is a markup language? Markup is information added to a
document that enhances its meaning in certain ways, in that it identifies the parts and how they relate to each
other. More specifically, a markup language is a set of symbols that can be placed in the text of a document to
demarcate and label the parts of that document.
Following example shows how XML markup looks, when embedded in a piece of text
This snippet includes the markup symbols, or the tags such as <message>...</message> and <text>... </text>.
The tags <message> and </message> mark the start and the end of the XML code fragment. The tags <text>
and </text> surround the text Hello, world!.

Is XML a Programming Language?

A programming language consists of grammar rules and its own vocabulary which is used to create computer
programs. These programs instruct the computer to perform specific tasks. XML does not qualify to be a
programming language as it does not perform any computation or algorithms. It is usually stored in a simple
text file and is processed by special software that is capable of interpreting XML.

SYNTAX

In this chapter, we will discuss the simple syntax rules to write an XML document. Following is a complete
XML document –

You can notice there are two kinds of information in the above example −
 Markup, like <contact-info>
 The text, or the character data, Tutorials Point and (040) 123-4567.
The following diagram depicts the syntax rules to write different types of markup and text in an XML
document.

Let us see each component of the above diagram in detail.

XML Declaration

The XML document can optionally have an XML declaration. It is written as follows

Where version is the XML version and encoding specifies the character encoding used in the document.
Syntax Rules for XML Declaration
 The XML declaration is case sensitive and must begin with "<?xml>" where "xml" is written in lower-
case.
 If document contains XML declaration, then it strictly needs to be the first statement of the XML
document.
 The XML declaration strictly needs be the first statement in the XML document.
 An HTTP protocol can override the value of encoding that you put in the XML declaration.

Tags and Elements

An XML file is structured by several XML-elements, also called XML-nodes or XML-tags. The names of XML-
elements are enclosed in triangular brackets < > as shown below −
Syntax Rules for Tags and Elements
Element Syntax − Each XML-element needs to be closed either with start or with end elements as shown
below

or in simple-cases, just this way

Nesting of Elements − An XML-element can contain multiple XML-elements as its children, but the children
elements must not overlap. i.e., an end tag of an element must have the same name as that of the most recent
unmatched start tag.
The Following example shows incorrect nested tags

The Following example shows correct nested tags

Root Element − An XML document can have only one root element. For example, following is not a correct
XML document, because both the x and y elements occur at the top level without a root element

The Following example shows a correctly formed XML document

Case Sensitivity − The names of XML-elements are case-sensitive. That means the name of the start and the
end elements need to be exactly in the same case.
For example, <contact-info> is different from <Contact-Info>
XML Attributes

An attribute specifies a single property for the element, using a name/value pair. An XML-element can have
one or more attributes. For example

Here href is the attribute name and http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ is attribute value.

Syntax Rules for XML Attributes
 Attribute names in XML (unlike HTML) are case sensitive. That is, HREF and href are considered two
different XML attributes.
 Same attribute cannot have two values in a syntax. The following example shows incorrect syntax
because the attribute b is specified twice

 Attribute names are defined without quotation marks, whereas attribute values must always appear
in quotation marks. Following example demonstrates incorrect xml syntax

In the above syntax, the attribute value is not defined in quotation marks.

XML References

References usually allow you to add or include additional text or markup in an XML document. References
always begin with the symbol "&" which is a reserved character and end with the symbol ";". XML has two
types of references −
 Entity References − An entity reference contains a name between the start and the end delimiters.
For example &amp; where amp is name. The name refers to a predefined string of text and/or
markup.
 Character References − These contain references, such as &#65;, contains a hash mark (“#”)
followed by a number. The number always refers to the Unicode code of a character. In this case, 65
refers to alphabet "A".

XML Text

The names of XML-elements and XML-attributes are case-sensitive, which means the name of start and end
elements need to be written in the same case. To avoid character encoding problems, all XML files should be
saved as Unicode UTF-8 or UTF-16 files.
Whitespace characters like blanks, tabs and line-breaks between XML-elements and between the XML-
attributes will be ignored.
Some characters are reserved by the XML syntax itself. Hence, they cannot be used directly. To use them, some
replacement-entities are used, which are listed below

Not Allowed Character Replacement Entity Character Description

< &lt; less than

> &gt; greater than

& &amp; ampersand

' &apos; apostrophe

" &quot; quotation mark

XML Documents

An XML document is a basic unit of XML information composed of elements and other markup in an orderly
package. An XML document can contains wide variety of data. For example, database of numbers, numbers
representing molecular structure or a mathematical equation.

XML Document Example

A simple document is shown in the following example

The following image depicts the parts of XML document.

Document Prolog Section

Document Prolog comes at the top of the document, before the root element. This section contains −

 XML declaration
 Document type declaration
You can learn more about XML declaration in this chapter − XML Declaration

Document Elements Section

Document Elements are the building blocks of XML. These divide the document into a hierarchy of sections,
each serving a specific purpose. You can separate a document into multiple sections so that they can be
rendered differently, or used by a search engine. The elements can be containers, with a combination of text
and other elements.
XML Declaration

This chapter covers XML declaration in detail. XML declaration contains details that prepare an XML
processor to parse the XML document. It is optional, but when used, it must appear in the first line of the XML
document.

Syntax

Following syntax shows XML declaration

Each parameter consists of a parameter name, an equals sign (=), and parameter value inside a quote.
Following table shows the above syntax in detail

Parameter Parameter_value Parameter_description

Version 1.0 Specifies the version of the XML standard used.

Encoding UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-10646- It defines the character encoding used in the document.
UCS-2, ISO-10646-UCS-4, UTF-8 is the default encoding used.
ISO-8859-1 to ISO-8859-9,
ISO-2022-JP, Shift_JIS, EUC-
JP
 Standalone yes or no It informs the parser whether the document relies on
the information from an external source, such as
external document type definition (DTD), for its
content. The default value is set to no. Setting it
to yes tells the processor there are no external
declarations required for parsing the document.

Rules

An XML declaration should abide with the following rules −

 If the XML declaration is present in the XML, it must be placed as the first line in the XML document.
 If the XML declaration is included, it must contain version number attribute.
 The Parameter names and values are case-sensitive.
 The names are always in lower case.
 The order of placing the parameters is important. The correct order is: version, encoding and
standalone.
 Either single or double quotes may be used.
 The XML declaration has no closing tag i.e. </?xml>
XML Declaration Examples
Following are few examples of XML declarations −
XML declaration with no parameters

XML declaration with version definition

XML declaration with all parameters defined

XML declaration with all parameters defined in single quotes

Tags

et us learn about one of the most important part of XML, the XML tags. XML tags form the foundation of XML.
They define the scope of an element in XML. They can also be used to insert comments, declare settings
required for parsing the environment, and to insert special instructions.
We can broadly categorize XML tags as follows

Start Tag

The beginning of every non-empty XML element is marked by a start-tag. Following is an example of start-tag

End Tag

Every element that has a start tag should end with an end-tag. Following is an example of end-tag

Note, that the end tags include a solidus ("/") before the name of an element.

Empty Tag

The text that appears between start-tag and end-tag is called content. An element which has no content is
termed as empty. An empty element can be represented in two ways as follows −
A start-tag immediately followed by an end-tag as shown below

A complete empty-element tag is as shown below

Empty-element tags may be used for any element which has no content.

XML Tags Rules

Following are the rules that need to be followed to use XML tags −
Rule 1
XML tags are case-sensitive. Following line of code is an example of wrong syntax </Address>, because of the
case difference in two tags, which is treated as erroneous syntax in XML.

Following code shows a correct way, where we use the same case to name the start and the end tag.

Rule 2
XML tags must be closed in an appropriate order, i.e., an XML tag opened inside another element must be
closed before the outer element is closed. For example

XML Elements

XML elements can be defined as building blocks of an XML. Elements can behave as containers to hold text,
elements, attributes, media objects or all of these.
Each XML document contains one or more elements, the scope of which are either delimited by start and end
tags, or for empty elements, by an empty-element tag.

Syntax

Following is the syntax to write an XML element

where,
 element-name is the name of the element. The name its case in the start and end tags must match.
 attribute1, attribute2 are attributes of the element separated by white spaces. An attribute defines
a property of the element. It associates a name with a value, which is a string of characters. An
attribute is written as

name is followed by an = sign and a string value inside double(" ") or single(' ') quotes.
Empty Element

An empty element (element with no content) has following syntax

Following is an example of an XML document using various XML element

XML Elements Rules

Following rules are required to be followed for XML elements −

 An element name can contain any alphanumeric characters. The only punctuation mark allowed in
names are the hyphen (-), under-score (_) and period (.).
 Names are case sensitive. For example, Address, address, and ADDRESS are different names.
 Start and end tags of an element must be identical.
 An element, which is a container, can contain text or elements as seen in the above example.

XML Attributes

This chapter describes the XML attributes. Attributes are part of XML elements. An element can have multiple
unique attributes. Attribute gives more information about XML elements. To be more precise, they define
properties of elements. An XML attribute is always a name-value pair.

Syntax

An XML attribute has the following syntax

where attribute1 and attribute2 has the following form

value has to be in double (" ") or single (' ') quotes. Here, attribute1 and attribute2 are unique attribute labels.
Attributes are used to add a unique label to an element, place the label in a category, add a Boolean flag, or
otherwise associate it with some string of data. Following example demonstrates the use of attributes

Attributes are used to distinguish among elements of the same name, when you do not want to create a new
element for every situation. Hence, the use of an attribute can add a little more detail in differentiating two or
more similar elements.
In the above example, we have categorized the plants by including attribute category and assigning different
values to each of the elements. Hence, we have two categories of plants, one flowers and other shrubs. Thus,
we have two plant elements with different attributes.
You can also observe that we have declared this attribute at the beginning of XML.

Attribute Types

Following table lists the type of attributes −

Attribute Type Description

StringType It takes any literal string as a value. CDATA is a StringType. CDATA is character data.
This means, any string of non-markup characters is a legal part of the attribute.

This is a more constrained type. The validity constraints noted in the grammar are
applied after the attribute value is normalized. The TokenizedType attributes are
given as −
TokenizedType
 ID − It is used to specify the element as unique.
 IDREF − It is used to reference an ID that has been named for another
element.
  IDREFS − It is used to reference all IDs of an element.
 ENTITY − It indicates that the attribute will represent an external entity in
the document.
 ENTITIES − It indicates that the attribute will represent external entities in
the document.
 NMTOKEN − It is similar to CDATA with restrictions on what data can be part
of the attribute.
 NMTOKENS − It is similar to CDATA with restrictions on what data can be
part of the attribute.

This has a list of predefined values in its declaration. out of which, it must assign one
value. There are two types of enumerated attribute −

EnumeratedType  NotationType − It declares that an element will be referenced to a

NOTATION declared somewhere else in the XML document.
 Enumeration − Enumeration allows you to define a specific list of values that
the attribute value must match.

Element Attribute Rules

Following are the rules that need to be followed for attributes −

 An attribute name must not appear more than once in the same start-tag or empty-element tag.
 An attribute must be declared in the Document Type Definition (DTD) using an Attribute-List
Declaration.
 Attribute values must not contain direct or indirect entity references to external entities.
 The replacement text of any entity referred to directly or indirectly in an attribute value must not
contain a less than sign (<)

XML – DTD

The XML Document Type Declaration, commonly known as DTD, is a way to describe XML language precisely.
DTDs check vocabulary and validity of the structure of XML documents against grammatical rules of
appropriate XML language.
An XML DTD can be either specified inside the document, or it can be kept in a separate document and then
liked separately.

Syntax
Basic syntax of a DTD is as follows

In the above syntax,

 The DTD starts with <!DOCTYPE delimiter.
 An element tells the parser to parse the document from the specified root element.
 DTD identifier is an identifier for the document type definition, which may be the path to a file on the
system or URL to a file on the internet. If the DTD is pointing to external path, it is called External
Subset.
 The square brackets [ ] enclose an optional list of entity declarations called Internal Subset.

Internal DTD

A DTD is referred to as an internal DTD if elements are declared within the XML files. To refer it as internal
DTD, standalone attribute in XML declaration must be set to yes. This means, the declaration works
independent of an external source.
Syntax
Following is the syntax of internal DTD

where root-element is the name of root element and element-declarations is where you declare the elements.
Example
Following is a simple example of internal DTD
Let us go through the above code −
Start Declaration − Begin the XML declaration with the following statement.