Character

Character indicates an element that allows character data up to a maximum number of characters, regardless of the number of bytes required to represent each character. The number after the hyphen specifies the maximum number of characters. For example, C-12 specifies an element of characters with maximum length 12 characters. C-Infinite indicates an element with no maximum length.

Note: Depending on the character encoding, each character may be represented by one or more bytes. For example, UTF-8 uses two bytes to encode characters represented in ISO Latin-1 as single bytes in the range 128 through 255 decimal. In addition, characters may be encoded as multi-byte character entities, and XML encodes the ampersand, less-than symbol, and greater-than symbol as “&” “<” and “>” when they appear as document content. Therefore, an element of type C-40 may be represented by more than 40 bytes in a UTF-8 encoded XML stream. For example, the string “AT&T” encodes “AT&T”.