CDATA

[Pradeep bhatt]

Sorry for asking a dumb question! Why do we need CDATA in XML when we can use "& lt;" and "& rt;".

[Lasse Koskela]

That's a good question. We might manage without CDATA but I still think it's useful. Consider a large text block containing hundreds and hundreds of special characters you need to encode as an entity reference. Without CDATA, you would need to do a lot more string manipulation compared to using CDATA. With CDATA, you only need to encode the ]]> into [[>