<p>This is a followup question of <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/156697/how-to-encode-characters-from-oracle-to-xml">How to encode characters from Oracle to Xml?</a></p>

<p>In my environment here I use Java to serialize the result set to xml. I have no access to the output stream itself, only to a org.xml.sax.ContentHandler.</p>

<p>When I try to output characters in a CDATA Section:</p>

<p>It happens basically like this:</p>

<pre><code>xmlHandler.startElement(uri, lname, "column", attributes);
String chars = "&lt;![CDATA["+rs.getString(i)+"]]&gt;";
xmlHandler.characters(chars.toCharArray(), 0, chars.length());
xmlHandler.endElement(uri, lname, "column");
</code></pre>

<p>I get this:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;column&gt;&amp;lt;![CDATA[33665]]&amp;gt;&lt;/column&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>But I want this:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;column&gt;&lt;![CDATA[33665]]&gt;&lt;/column&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>So how can I output a CDATA section with a Sax ContentHandler?</p>

It is getting escaped because the handler.characters function is designed to escape and the
```
<![CDATA[
```
part isn't considered part of the value.
You need to use the newly exposed methods in
```
DefaultHandler2
```
or use the
```
TransformerHandler
```
approach where you can set the output key
```
CDATA_SECTION_ELEMENTS
```
, which takes a whitespace delimited list of tag names that should output sub text sections enclosed in CDATA.
```
```
StreamResult streamResult = new StreamResult(out);
SAXTransformerFactory tf = (SAXTransformerFactory) SAXTransformerFactory.newInstance();
TransformerHandler hd = tf.newTransformerHandler();
Transformer serializer = hd.getTransformer();
serializer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.CDATA_SECTION_ELEMENTS, "column");
hd.setResult(streamResult);
hd.startDocument();
hd.startElement("","","column",atts);
hd.characters(asdf,0, asdf.length());
hd.endElement("","","column");
hd.endDocument();
```
```