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XML Quiz

• From: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>
• To: "xml-dev@lists.xml.org" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2022 22:02:01 +0000

Hi Folks,

In a previous post I asked: 

What stage should the entity & be converted to &?
(a)	Lexical analysis stage
(b)	Syntax analysis stage
(c)	Semantic analysis stage

One person suggested that entities can be converted even before the lexical analysis stage, in a preprocessor stage -- analogous to the way a C preprocessor replaces macro definitions.

Question: Are there any problems with converting all entities in a preprocessor stage?

See answer below .........














Answer: If you were to convert all entities, then that would result in converting this:

	<![CDATA[&amp;]]>

to this:

	<![CDATA[&]]>

And that would be incorrect.

Thanks to Matt Timmermans for pointing this out to me.

/Roger