xml-dev - Trouble with external entities that reference complete XML documents

[Paul Roe <Paul_Roe@emeraldsolutions.com>]

I am trying to divide a large XML document into several smaller, well-formed
"child" XML documents that can stand alone, while maintaining a parent
document with external entity references to each of the child documents.
The problem I am running into is that when I parse the document with the
Javax DocumentBuilder, It returns an error:

** Parsing error, line 1, uri file:/anees.xml
   Expected "encoding=...".

Here's the anees.xml file
	<?xml version="1.0" ?>
	<Something>Sometext</Something>

If I remove the xml declaration so that the file only contains the single
line
	<Something>Sometext</Something>

Then the parser is happy.  I am trying to understand
1. If this is expected behavior or not.
2. If this is expected behavior, then what are some other techniques I
should consider for accomplishing what I want to accomplish?
3. If this is not the expected behavior, then where can I find a parser that
behaves correctly?

Thanks,
Paul Roe

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