The term

CDATA

means,

Character Data

. CDATA is defined as blocks of text that

are not parsed

by the parser, but are otherwise recognized as markup

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<student>
    <!-- Some comment about the student -->
    <first-name>George</first-name>
    <phone.mobile>(011) 123-4567</phone.mobile>
    <city />
    <description>
        <![CDATA[
            <p>
            <a href="/mylink/article1"><img style="float: left; margin-right: 5px;" height="80" src="/mylink/image" alt=""/></a>
            Author Names
            <br/><em>Date</em>
            <br/>Paragraph of text describing the article to be displayed</p>
        ]]>        
    </description>
</student>

CDATA Start section

- CDATA begins with the nine-character delimiter

<![CDATA[

CDATA End section

- CDATA section ends with

]]>

delimiter

CData section

- Characters inside

CData

section are interpreted as characters, and not as markup. It may contain markup characters

<

,

>

, and

&

, but they are ignored by the XML processor