The XML might not well-formed.

I can't tell you why off the top of my head, I haven't used parameter entities in a while, but if you put the xml in a separate file and if you run xmllint (the XML checker that comes with libxml2) it complains that the entity flower is not defined.

That said, when I add the proper element declarations and when I reverse the order of the 2 entity declarations, xmllint is quite happy, so it looks indeed like XML::Twig does not deal properly with parameter entities, I have to check, I haven't touched that corner of the code in years.

Actually, after looking a little deeper, it looks like it's an XML::Parser problem: when loading the external DTD, XML::Twig parses a fake document that's just the DTD and a dummy element, in order to get the entity values, otherwise XML::Parser does not read the external DTD at all.

But when I parse the document created from the DTD, either with XML::Parser or just with xmlwf (the xml checker that comes with expat), I get an "illegal parameter entity reference" error.

The document is:

<!DOCTYPE dummy [
<!ENTITY % flower_ref "daffodil">
<!ENTITY flower "%flower_ref;">
]>
<dummy/>
[download]

So this looks a bit tricky to fix. If you have any idea, I'll take it ;--(