Character data may be any legal (Unicode) character with the
exception of "<". The "<" character is reserved for the
start of a tag.
XML also provides a couple of useful
entity references
that
you can use so as not to create any doubt whether you are
specifying character data versus markup. Specifically, XML
provides the following entity references:
Character
Entity Reference
>
>
<
<
&
&
"
"
'
'
Obviously, the < entity reference is useful for character
data. The other entity references can be used within markup
in cases in which there could be confusion such as:
<STATEMENT VALUE =
"She said, "Don't go there!"">
Which should be written as:
<STATEMENT VALUE =
"She said, "Don't go there!"">
