Why does InDesign put "c_" before literal text?

I'm working with the old interchange format of Adobe InDesign (.inx files).

This XML file has text contents like the following:

<pcnt>c_Stackoverflow&#13;&#13;</pcnt>

Which results in

Stackoverflow<CR><CR>

Question: Why does it put c_ before the actual value and not simply use CDATA in doubt?

Solution

Adobe has been encoding everything.

The reason they prefix the payload is because you can have several values in a single field, hence, CDATA would not be working.

c_ indicates a string

x_ represents a list (enum)

x_a represents a list with 0x0a items (a = 10 hexadecimal)

l_ represents a long

See a full list of all prefixes in the PDF: