See Also: XmlConvert Members
Element and attribute names or ID values are limited to a range of XML characters according to the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition) recommendation, located at www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006.html. When names contain invalid characters, they need to be translated into valid XML names.
Many languages and applications allow Unicode characters in their names, which are not valid in XML names. For example, if 'Order Detail' were a column heading in a database, the database allows the space between the words Order and Detail. However, in XML, the space between Order and Detail is considered an invalid XML character. Thus, the space, the invalid character, needs to be converted into an escaped hexadecimal encoding and can be decoded later.
The XmlConvert.EncodeName(string) and XmlConvert.DecodeName(string) methods are used to translate invalid XML names into valid XML names and vice versa.
System.Xml.XmlConvert provides methods that enable the conversion of a string to a CLI data type and vice-versa. Locale settings are not taken into account during data conversion.
System.Xml.XmlConvert also provides methods that convert between XML Schema Definition (XSD) data types (see http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#built-in-datatypes) and their corresponding common language infrastructure (CLI) data types. The following table shows the XSD data types and their corresponding CLI data types.
| XSD data type | CLI data type |
|---|---|
| hexBinary | A byte array |
| base64Binary | A byte array |
| Boolean | bool |
| Byte | sbyte |
| normalizedString | string |
| Date | DateTime |
| duration | TimeSpan |
| dateTime | DateTime |
| decimal | decimal |
| Double | double |
| ENTITIES | A string array |
| ENTITY | string |
| Float | float |
| gMonthDay | DateTime |
| gDay | DateTime |
| gYear | DateTime |
| gYearMonth | DateTime |
| ID | string |
| IDREF | string |
| IDREFS | A string array |
| int | int |
| integer | decimal |
| language | string |
| long | long |
| month | DateTime |
| Name | string |
| NCName | string |
| negativeInteger | decimal |
| NMTOKEN | string |
| NMTOKENS | A string array |
| nonNegativeInteger | decimal |
| nonPositiveInteger | decimal |
| NOTATION | string |
| positiveInteger | decimal |
| short | short |
| string | string |
| time | DateTime |
| timePeriod | DateTime |
| token | string |
| unsignedByte | byte |
| unsignedInt | uint |
| unsignedLong | ulong |
| unsignedShort | ushort |
| anyURI | Uri |