---
title: Characters to Avoid in XML Data
description: Certain characters need to be encoded when working with XML data in SYSPRO and in general.
---

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## [Characters to Avoid in XML Data](https://customer.syspro.com/characters-to-avoid-in-xml-data)

Posted by [Canada Support Team](https://customer.syspro.com/author/canada-support-team)

 Apr 3, 2014 10:53:00 AM

There are five special characters that you should not use as values within your XML data. These special characters can be replaced with a string of characters known as Entity References.

The characters are the less-than and greater-than signs (because XML would not know where the elements start and finish), the apostrophe / single quote, the double-quote, and the ampersand (because the entity references start with an ampersand).

All entity references start with an ampersand and finish with a semi-colon.

The below table lists the characters and the entity references in place of those characters.

| **Character   ** | **Entity Reference    ** | **Description** |
| --- | --- | --- |
| < | &lt; | Less-than |
| > | &gt; | Greater-than |
| ' | &apos; | Apostraphe / single quote |
| " | &quot; | Double quote |
| & | &amp; | Ampersand |

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