Re: XML::Parser and &entity;

Your data is still not well-formed XML. The only pre-defined entities in XML are <, &, >, " and '. Numerical entities, &#nb; or &#xnb; are also allowed. Everything else needs to be declared.

So you have several options here:

you can just turn all those entities into their numerical equivalent (for example ≤ is≤); this will be a pain, error-prone, and will not take advantage of XML power (which is a mortal sin in certain circles!),
you can include all of the entity definitions you need in the document:
```
<!DOCTYPE rec [
<!ENTITY le "&#8804; >

]>
<rec> &le;</rec>
[download]
```
this has the advantage that your documents are standalone (they don't depend on external files) but an empty document might be quite big,

you can also go all the (XML) way and include the entity declarations through... entities, the way it's done in the HTML DTD:

<!DOCTYPE rec [
<!ENTITY % HTMLlat1 PUBLIC
   "-//W3C//ENTITIES Latin 1 for XHTML//EN"
   "xhtml-lat1.ent">
%HTMLlat1;

<!ENTITY % HTMLsymbol PUBLIC
   "-//W3C//ENTITIES Symbols for XHTML//EN"
   "xhtml-symbol.ent">
%HTMLsymbol;

<!ENTITY % HTMLspecial PUBLIC
   "-//W3C//ENTITIES Special for XHTML//EN"
   "xhtml-special.ent">
%HTMLspecial;
]>
<rec> &le;</rec>
[download]

you can get the entity declaration files from the W3C.

You could also internally use the entity declaration files and pre-process the XML to convert them to numerical entities. I can't think of an easy way to do this right now (except using xmlwf -p -d result_dir file.xml but then the output is in utf-8) but I'll have a look at it.

Update: fixed typo in doctype

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Re: Re: XML::Parser and &entity; by dingus (Friar) on Nov 26, 2002 at 18:00 UTC
Just to get this 100% clear in my not very XMLized head. An valid XML file with no includes/inline entity definitions may contain: Valid unicode utf-8 characters <, &, >, ", '. Numerical entities, &#nb; or &#xnb; and nothing else? The good news is that I do in fact control the source data file so I can do further mungeing. It looks like the best option is to utf-8 the file including convertig to utf-8 the entities that are not defined. Then, since the characters are in fact all valid latin-1 doing my favourite pack/unpack trick to convert UTF-8 back to latin-1 for the display `sub utf8toNative() { my $c = pack("C",unpack("U",$_[0])); return ((length($c)==length($u))?$_[0]:$c);` [download] (You have to return the string unchanged if the lengths are the same as new string may be incorrect in such cases) Dingus `Enter any 47-digit prime number to continue.`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: XML::Parser and &entity; by mirod (Canon) on Nov 26, 2002 at 19:12 UTC
utf-8-ing everything will indeed save you some headache. That will be playing along with the "XML Way", instead of fighting it. Just to be complete though: you can use an other encoding if you specify it in the xml declaration (`<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>`. XML::Parser based modules will nevertheless convert the input to utf-8 before passing it to your code.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: XML::Parser and &entity; by mirod (Canon) on Nov 26, 2002 at 17:46 UTC
The easiest way I have found to resolve the entities, replacing them by the numerical entity, and to drop the now useledd DTD is to use `xmllint`, from libxml2: `xmllint --noent --dropdtd <file.xml>`	[reply] [d/l]