RE: recognize character entities

>> Is it in the spirit of XML to let the parser expand the entity
>> references back to themselves? For example, in the above
>situation, is
>> this a reasonable thing to do:
>
>  <!ENTITY euro "&amp;euro;">
>
>It might be (but probably isn't:-) But that isn't making teh entity
>reference convert back to itself, it's making it expand to the 6
>characters &euro;, not to an entity reference.
>
>the real question is why are you looking for the entity refs.
>The whole point of entities are supposed to be as an author convenience
>so if the _author_ doesn't have a euro key on his or her keyboard and
>finds it convenient to instead type &euro; that they may do so safe in
>the knowledge that alllater applications will treat &euro; the same as
>if the character had been entered directly.
>
>So if you make &euro; be something else then the "spirit" has
>been broken
>in that now the character and the entity ref will do different things.
>
>Do you really need to look for entity refererences or do you need to
>look for characters that are normally entered via entity references?
>
>If you do end up redefining teh entities, it's easier to test for
><entity name="euro"/> in xslt1 than it is for a string containing
>&amp;euro; and much easier to use xslt to convert it back to a single
>character.
>
>But the question is really _why_ do you want to treat
>&euro; differently from &#8364; ?


Sorry, I apologize. I interjected the question above on entity handling, but
failed to note that I wasn't the original poster for this thread. I was
curious about the poster's situation because I came across something similar
some time ago. Unfortunately, I can't detail the exact circumstances of why I
needed to do such a thing. Vaguely, it had something to do with creating a
mapping table of some sort.

Anyway, the bottom line is that, obviously, I don't know the reasoning WHY
behind the original poster's query.

Sorry I misspoke. Didn't mean to sidetrack the discussion.

Mike Waters