2 * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
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3 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
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4 * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
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5 * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
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6 * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
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7 * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
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8 * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
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10 * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
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13 package org.w3c.dom;
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16 * CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that
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17 * would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is
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18 * recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]>" string that ends the CDATA
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19 * section. CDATA sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for
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20 * including material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all
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22 * <p>The <code>DOMString</code> attribute of the <code>Text</code> node holds
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23 * the text that is contained by the CDATA section. Note that this may
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24 * contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and
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25 * that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for
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26 * serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part
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27 * of a CDATA section.
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28 * <p> The <code>CDATASection</code> interface inherits from the
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29 * <code>CharacterData</code> interface through the <code>Text</code>
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30 * interface. Adjacent <code>CDATASection</code> nodes are not merged by use
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31 * of the <code>normalize</code> method of the <code>Node</code> interface.
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32 * Because no markup is recognized within a <code>CDATASection</code>,
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33 * character numeric references cannot be used as an escape mechanism when
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34 * serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken when serializing a
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35 * <code>CDATASection</code> with a character encoding where some of the
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36 * contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to do so would not
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37 * produce well-formed XML.One potential solution in the serialization
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38 * process is to end the CDATA section before the character, output the
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39 * character using a character reference or entity reference, and open a new
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40 * CDATA section for any further characters in the text node. Note, however,
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41 * that some code conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return
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42 * an error or exception when a character is missing from the encoding,
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43 * making the task of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization
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45 * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>.
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47 public interface CDATASection extends Text {
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