CDATA in XML Files

Since XML is a tag based language: <tag>content</tag> some characters like brackets (< or >) are reserved for the XML markup itself. If your data contains these characters it may cause a parser to become confused. We recommend that you embed all fields that contain string values in CDATA tags in order to avoid the risk of your content causing troubles for our parser.

<g:field><![CDATA[your complex string with special xml markup characters]]></g:field>

Here you can see an example of CDATA on a google_product_category. Even if the data contains brackets > and special characters like & they will parse successfully and without the need for encoding when wrapped in a CDATA tag.

<g:google_product_category><![CDATA[Animals & Pet Supplies > Pet Supplies > Reptile & Amphibian Supplies]]></g:google_product_category>

Your Data

Beware that even if you do not have any data containing these special characters today, you might add a product at a later stage that have these special characters in it´s description or other string fields. Hence we recommend to always use CDATA wrapping in order to avoid unexpected errors in the future.