RE: multiple special characters in XML

> I can add <!ENTITY eacute "é"> to the XML
> header. But then if they add something else cute tomorrow I 
> am stuck with bad XML again, until I add a new declaration. 
> 	I could add all possible declarations now and have huge XML
> documents (We store 1000s of them)	Alternatively I could 
> look for all the referenced entities and construct an appropriate
> header for each document, which seems like a lot of overhead

Well, the solution *must* be to declare those entities *somewhere* in your
documents. The efficiency tradeoff may not be as bad as you think. It's only
about 250 entity declarations with one character of replacement text per
entity.

Another listmember sent me this document a few months ago:
http://www.skew.org/xml/misc_demos/Html40EntityDeclsForXml.dtd
(view source if it doesn't show up in your browser)

It seems to be derived from this section of the HTML 4.0 spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/sgml/entities.html

...and a more XML oriented variation can be found in the XHTML 1.0 spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/xhtml-modularization-19990406/module_defs.html#a_x
html_character_entities

However, none of these resources are appropriate for referencing directly at
the URIs indicated -- my copy is unofficial and on a private web server, and
the others are embedded in HTML documents. It would be inefficient to rely
on network connectivity to be fetching the DTD from remote locations,
anyway. 

If you don't want to explicitly declare the entities in every document, put
the Html40EntityDeclsForXml.dtd file somewhere locally, then reference it
from your XML and/or XSL documents like this (well, replace xsl:stylesheet
with the document element as needed, and make sure the path/URI to the DTD
is correct):

<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet SYSTEM "Html40EntityDeclsForXml.dtd" ]>

This is the same as putting it in your documents, and introduces an
inefficiency in that you need to access an extra file all the time. Your
other option would be to use a post-processor to replace those named
entities in the XML with their corresponding numeric references.

-Mike


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