escaping special characters in sql for generating xml file - sql

Question

I am using SQL server 2008 and I'm quite new to writing sql. My aim is to export data from a table into xml format to create a CAP xml file that can be used in our website. Currently, I'm just writing some select statements to retrieve data in the correct format. Here is the code:
select (SELECT TOP 5 [Master_Incident_Number] AS incidents
,[Jurisdiction] AS jurisdiction
,[Response_Date] AS Date
FROM [ESCAD_DW_System].[dbo].[CurrentIncidents_V] Incident
FOR XML PATH ('area'), type ) AS Alert for xml path (''),
ROOT ('?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "UTF-8"?')
However, I am getting 'invalid XML identifier' error for '?' symbol. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

You cannot use ROOT to add an xml encoding tag. The only way to do that is to convert the xml output into varchar(max) and prepend with your encoding tag. Keep in mind though that FOR XML output is UTF-16 by default, and therefore your UTF-8 encoding is probably unnecessary. Having said that, here is a simple example that uses a UDF to convert the xml into varchar(max):
create function gimmexml()
returns varchar(max)
as
begin
return (
select a='some', b='xml'
for xml path ('')
)
end
go
select '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>'+dbo.gimmexml();
Result:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><a>some</a><b>xml</b>
Further reading:
http://www.devnewsgroups.net/group/microsoft.public.sqlserver.xml/topic60022.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345137%28v=sql.90%29.aspx