9. DTD for Elements with Character Data

All non markup text is referred to as parsed character data in a DTD. Parsed character data is abbreviated as PCDATA in element declarations. Parsed character data means text that does not contain markup, just simple character data.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<!DOCTYPE rootelement [
<!ELEMENT rootelement (#PCDATA)>
]>
<rootelement>Parsed character data.</rootelement>
	

Parsed character data is the only way to specify the content of an element and is limited to only plain text. Numbers for example would be considered only plain text.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<!DOCTYPE rootelement [
<!ELEMENT rootelement (#PCDATA)>
]>
<rootelement>1</rootelement>
	

In the example above, the number "1" is considered plain text.