xml replace function

[Devya Narayan]

Hello,
We need to generate a xml file with data like this,
<person description="&lt;B&gt;Preethi&lt;/B&gt;" age="6"/>
<person description="&lt;B&gt;Devya&lt;/B&gt;" age="6"/&gt;

<B>Preethi</B> and <B>Devya</B> comes from DB.
So we wrote a replace function which replaces "<" tag with "&lt;",but this goes to infinite loop because we have one more replace function which replaces "&" with "&nbsp;".
How can i replace "<" with "&lt;"
">" with "&gt;"
"&" with "&nbsp;"
"'" with "&apos;" without any clash?

Thanks,
Devya
[ June 28, 2006: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]

[William Brogden]

When I had to do this sort of conversion I created a set of intermediate "place holder" tokens to avoid the infinite loop. It means an extra cycle of replaces but you get there eventually.
Bill

[Jim Yingst]

[Devya Narayan]: So we wrote a replace function which replaces "<" tag with "<",but this goes to infinite loop because we have one more replace function which replaces "&" with " "

Couldn't you just replace "&" with "&amp;" first? Then on any subsequent replacements, any new "&" which turn up will not be replaced.

The other way to do this is to have a single pass handle all the replacements. Loop through each character in the input and look it up in a Map (or array or switch statement) to determine what, if anything, it needs to be replaced with. Then write either the replacement, or the original character if no replacement exists.

[Sergio Costa]

Have you considered XMLSerializer?

I tend to avoid re-inventing the wheel when at all possible.

[Paul Clapham]

Originally posted by Devya Narayan:
So we wrote a replace function which replaces "<" tag with "&lt;",but this goes to infinite loop because we have one more replace function which replaces "&" with "&nbsp;".

So do them in the opposite order. Replace "&" by "&amp;" first, then replace "<" by "&lt;".