Maybe... I was thinking that the most generally accessible way to have the data would be to map the entity name to an integer. Also have a reverse lookup. For validating, it doesn't matter what's in the value since I'll just check for key existence.

In order to use your list for anything other than the charnames construct or perhaps displaying a readable form, you would have to look up the value to resolve the actual character or code number.

I'm all for having only one list of all the Entities stored somewhere for all code to draw upon. Maybe it should present a lookup API that can return any or all of those items and how it's stored internally is opaque.

What do you think?