xml-dev - Re: Confused about & in entity literal

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

> Yes I know that the ampersands should have been escaped technically,

Why "technically"?  If it wasn't meant to be an entity reference, the
document is just plain wrong.  If it *is* meant to be an entity reference,
why is it any stranger than, say,

 <[128K of name characters]/>

or any of the other places where a name occurs?

> but how many parsers would blow up in this situation trying to
> buffer up that much text?

It's tempting to use fixed-size buffers for such things, but when I've
done that in the past it's usually turned out to be a mistake.

Have you found parsers that "blow up" in this case?

Of course, an implementation is perfectly free to warn about absurdly
long names.

-- Richard

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