Re: [xml-dev] Parsing without resolving entities

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

It depends a bit on what you are going to do with the document, and in
particular whether you are using an XML API that can support undefined
entity references. if you are (DOM for example) all you need is to
arrange that the DTD that defines the entities is not read.
If you are not (and most XSLT processing for example requires the
entities expanded as the xpath data model does not support undefined
entities) then you need to remove them somehow, perhaps in a form that
lets them be replaced.

As you suggest, preprocessing to hide the ampersand works (especially
for more complicated entities that you could not re-constitute just from
the character data). 

Or you can modify the dtd so that — expaands to — and
then you don't need to change the document on input (but do still need
to post process the result to get rid of the extra quoting.

or (perhaps) you can let all the entities expand but then finally
serialise the data using entities rather than characters where possible
(for example XSLT will do this if writing html, or XSLT2 you can specify
a character map (eg
http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/iso9573-2003/iso9573-2003map.xsl)
that will do the same thing. Note that this doesn't preserve the
original entities, juist uses entities wherever possible, whether or not
the input used that form.


David

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