Re: [xsl] Entity References

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Werner,

>Do the entity declarations need to be in the MathML document?   I tried
>declaring them in my XSLT and still recieved the error.

Yes, they do.

Handling entities isn't really an XSL problem; as Mike suggested, it's 
lower down on the XML "food chain". Declaring them in your XSL stylesheet 
won't happen because when the source document is parsed, the parser needs 
those declarations, and it hasn't even gotten to the stylesheet yet (and 
doesn't know it's going there).

Generally this problem is handled in either of two ways:

1. Parse your document with its DTD (or with the entity declarations 
otherwise accessible via the DTD internal subset), and live with the fact 
that once they're processed, you have the literal characters (or their 
character-reference equivalents, such as   instead of  ), not the 
entities. OR,

2. Pre-process your documents with a non-XML-aware script or routine (you 
could use Perl, sed or whatever) that changes the entity references into 
something markup-safe (for example, changing all '&' characters into 
'={[amp]}=' would probably do it). Then when you're done with the 
transform, change them back. Note that after changing them back, you'll 
need those declarations again to parse the new document.

As I said, this isn't really an XSL question. The XML processor ("parser"), 
that does the initial parse of character stream into memory object, will 
want those declarations no matter what you intend to do with the data.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
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