I want to create an XML file which will be used to store the structure of a Java program. I am able to successfully parse the Java program and create the tags as required. The problem arises when I try to include the source code inside my tags, since Java source code may use a vast number of entity reference and reserved characters like `&amp;`, `&lt;` ,`&gt;` , `&amp;`. I am not able to create a valid XML.

My XML should go like this:

    &lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;?&gt;
    &lt;prg name=&quot;prg_name&quot;&gt;
      &lt;class name= &quot;class_name&gt;
        &lt;parent&gt;parent class&lt;/parent&gt;
          &lt;interface&gt;Interface name&lt;/interface&gt;
    .
    .
    .
          &lt;method name= &quot;method_name&quot;&gt;
            &lt;statement&gt;the ordinary java statement&lt;/statement&gt;
            &lt;if condition=&quot;Conditional Expression&quot;&gt;
              &lt;statement&gt; true statements &lt;/statement&gt;
            &lt;/if&gt;
            &lt;else&gt;
              &lt;statement&gt; false statements &lt;/statement&gt;
            &lt;/else&gt;
            &lt;statement&gt; usual control statements &lt;/statement&gt;
     .
     .
     .
          &lt;/method&gt;
        &lt;/class&gt;
     .
     .
     .
     &lt;/prg&gt;

Like this, but the problem is conditional expressions of `if` or other statements have a lot of `&amp;` or other reserved symbols in them which prevents XML from getting validated. Since all this data (source code) is given by the user I have little control over it. Escaping the characters will be very costly in terms of time.

I can use CDATA to escape the element text but it can not be used for attribute values containing conditional expressions. I am using [Antlr][1] Java grammar to parse the Java program and getting the attributes and content for the tags. So is there any other workaround for it?

  [1]: http://www.antlr.org/

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How do I include &, <, > etc in XML attribute values