Good question. I'm not sure of TinyXML's exact behaviour on this one, but most will break it down into another DOM element. However, most XML libraries I've used will provide the functionality to retrieve the text contents of a node including the raw unparsed XML. It's just a case of finding out with TinyXML function does that for you, I'm guessing TiXmlNode::ToText() but I could be wrong. I'll need to experiment on this.