What is XML Escape?
XML escape is the process of converting special characters in text to their XML entity equivalents to prevent parsing errors and injection attacks. Whether you're a developer embedding user input in SOAP messages, a backend engineer building XML payloads, or a web service developer handling text data in XML APIs, our XML escape tool ensures your strings are safe for XML embedding.
This tool escapes ampersands (&) to &, less-than (<) to <, greater-than (>) to >, quotes (") to ", and apostrophes (') to '. Simply paste your text and get instant XML-safe output ready for embedding in XML documents, SOAP envelopes, configuration files, and data interchange formats.
Why Use XML Escape?
XML escaping is critical for security and correctness in web services and data interchange. Developers must escape user-generated content before embedding in SOAP messages to prevent XML injection attacks, handle special characters in API payloads correctly, ensure text data doesn't break XML structure, and prevent parsing errors in XML-based systems. Unescaped special characters can corrupt XML documents or create security vulnerabilities.
SOAP API developers use XML escape to sanitize user input for SOAP requests, prepare text data for XML-RPC calls, embed dynamic content in XML templates safely, and protect against XXE (XML External Entity) injection attacks. Backend engineers benefit from escaping database query results for XML export, preparing log messages for XML-based logging systems, and ensuring configuration values with special characters don't break XML configs.
The tool prevents XML parsing errors, protects against injection attacks, and ensures data integrity during XML transmission. It's particularly valuable when building SOAP web services, handling user-generated content in XML APIs, or working with text that may contain characters that have special meaning in XML syntax.
Common Use Cases
SOAP API Development: Escape user input before embedding in SOAP request/response messages.
Security: Prevent XML injection and XXE attacks by escaping untrusted content.
User-Generated Content: Safely embed comments, reviews, and forum posts in XML feeds.
Configuration Files: Escape special characters in XML config values and properties.
Data Export: Prepare database text fields for XML export with proper escaping.
RSS/Atom Feeds: Escape article content and descriptions for XML feed generation.
How to Use the XML Escape Tool
Using our XML escape tool is simple: paste your text containing special characters into the input field, and the escaped XML-safe output appears instantly. The tool automatically converts all XML special characters (&, <, >, ", ') to their entity equivalents. Copy the result for use in your XML documents.
The tool handles all XML special characters correctly, supports large text blocks, preserves line breaks and formatting, and produces output ready for immediate XML embedding. All escaping is performed client-side in your browser, ensuring your text data remains private and secure. The output is immediately safe for use in SOAP messages, XML documents, and configuration files.