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6.13.1 Creating XML Values

To produce a value of type xml from character data, use the function xmlparse:

XMLPARSE ( { DOCUMENT | CONTENT } value)

Examples:

XMLPARSE (DOCUMENT '<?xml version="1.0"?><book><title>Manual</
  title><chapter>...</chapter></book>')
XMLPARSE (CONTENT 'abc<foo>bar</foo><bar>foo</bar>')

While this is the only way to convert character strings into XML values according to the SQL standard, the PostgreSQL-specific syntaxes:

xml '<foo>bar</foo>'
'<foo>bar</foo>'::xml

can also be used.

The xml type does not validate input values against a document type declaration (DTD), even when the input value specifies a DTD. There is also currently no built-in support for validating against other XML schema languages such as XML Schema.

The inverse operation, producing a character string value from xml, uses the function xmlserialize:

XMLSERIALIZE ( { DOCUMENT | CONTENT } value AS type )

type can be character, character varying, or text (or an alias for one of those). Again, according to the SQL standard, this is the only way to convert between type xml and character types, but PostgreSQL also allows you to simply cast the value.

When a character string value is cast to or from type xml without going through XMLPARSE or XMLSERIALIZE, respectively, the choice of DOCUMENT versus CONTENT is determined by the “XML option” session configuration parameter, which can be set using the standard command:

SET XML OPTION { DOCUMENT | CONTENT };

or the more PostgreSQL-like syntax

SET xmloption TO { DOCUMENT | CONTENT };

The default is CONTENT, so all forms of XML data are allowed.

Note: With the default XML option setting, you cannot directly cast character strings to type xml if they contain a document type declaration, because the definition of XML content fragment does not accept them. If you need to do that, either use XMLPARSE or change the XML option.