XML | Elements

The XML elements are the basic building block of the XML document. It is used as a container to store text elements, attributes, media objects etc. Every XML documents contain at least one element whose scopes are delimited by start and end tags or in case of empty elements it is delimited by an empty tag. 

Syntax:

<element-name attributes> Contents...</element-name>

• element-name: It is the name of element.
• attributes: The attributes are used to define the XML element property and these attributes are separated by white space. It associates the name with a value, which is a string of characters.

Example:

name="Geeks"
Here, Geeks represents the value of attribute

Rules to define XML elements: There are some rules to create XML elements which are given below:

• An element can contain alphanumeric values or characters. But only three special characters are required in the names these are hyphen, underscore and period.
• Names are case sensitive. It means lower case letters have different meaning and upper case characters have different meaning. For example address, Address, aDDress are different names.
• Both start and end tags for elements need to be same.
• An element, which is a container, can contain text or elements

Empty Elements: An element in XML document which does not contains the content is known as Empty Element. The basic syntax of empty element in XML as follows:

<elements-name attributename/>

Example 1: Following is the example of an XML document describing the address of a college student using XML elements. 

<?xml version = “1.0”?>
<contactinfo>
    <address category = “college”>
        <name>G4G</name>
        <College>Geeksforgeeks</College>
        <mobile>2345456767</mobile>
    </address>
</contactinfo>

Output:

      G4G
      Geeksforgeeks
      2345456767

Example 2: 

<?xml version = "1.0"?>
<student>
    <_personal_details = "Personal Details">
        <name>xyz</name>
        <father_name>abc</father_name>
    </personal_details>
    <edu_details = "Educational Details">
        <hsc_perc>80%</hsc_perc>
        <ssc_perc>98%</ssc_perc>
    </edu_details>
</student>

Output:

      xyz 
      abc
      80%
      98%