Document: createCDATASection() method

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

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createCDATASection() creates a new CDATA section node, and returns it.

Syntax

js
createCDATASection(data)

Parameters

data

A string containing the data to be added to the CDATA Section.

Return value

A CDATA Section node.

Examples

js
const doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString("<xml></xml>", "application/xml");
const cdata = doc.createCDATASection("Some <CDATA> data & then some");
doc.querySelector("xml").appendChild(cdata);
console.log(new XMLSerializer().serializeToString(doc));
// Displays: <xml><![CDATA[Some <CDATA> data & then some]]></xml>

Notes

  • This will only work with XML, not HTML documents (as HTML documents do not support CDATA sections); attempting it on an HTML document will throw NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR.
  • Will throw a NS_ERROR_DOM_INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR exception if one tries to submit the closing CDATA sequence (]]>) as part of the data, so unescaped user-provided data cannot be safely used without this method getting this exception (createTextNode() can often be used in its place).

Specifications

Specification
DOM
# ref-for-dom-document-createcomment①

Browser compatibility