How to get XML parser to recognize entities (eg. —)

[Kalessin]

I'm using PHP's XML parser to validate user-entered XHTML fragments (I
wrap them in a top-level element and send them through the parser). It
works a treat, except for handling entities:

— -- is fine, but
— -- throws an error, e.g:

"XML error: undefined entity at line 11, char 415"

(Making an entity handler didn't help, at it fails at the parsing stage.)

Obviously I could search and replace to turn entities into their
character values, but that's pretty ugly. How can I get the XML parser
to recognize XHTML's entity set? Do I need to wrap the text fragment in
a full-blown XHTML document, including the DTD specifier?

Thanks in advance,
Kalessin.

[Andy Hassall]

Re: How to get XML parser to recognize entities (eg. —)

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:16:43 GMT, Kalessin
<try@http://jesus.com.au/html/email/kalessin> wrote:
[color=blue]
>I'm using PHP's XML parser to validate user-entered XHTML fragments (I
>wrap them in a top-level element and send them through the parser). It
>works a treat, except for handling entities:
>
>— -- is fine, but
>&mdash; -- throws an error, e.g:
>
> "XML error: undefined entity at line 11, char 415"
>
>(Making an entity handler didn't help, at it fails at the parsing stage.)
>
>Obviously I could search and replace to turn entities into their
>character values, but that's pretty ugly. How can I get the XML parser
>to recognize XHTML's entity set? Do I need to wrap the text fragment in
>a full-blown XHTML document, including the DTD specifier?[/color]

Possibly. If you look at the XML spec, there's only a limited set of entities
that XML parsers must accept without them being declared in a DTD:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-predefined-ent

The XHTML DTD imports the character references near the start:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Could you make a mini-DTD that only imports the entities?

--
Andy Hassall (andy@andyh.co. uk) icq(5747695) (http://www.andyh.co.uk)
Space: disk usage analysis tool (http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space)

[Alessandro Bondi]

Re: How to get XML parser to recognize entities (eg. &amp;mdash;)

> The XHTML DTD imports the character references near the start:[color=blue]
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd
>
> Could you make a mini-DTD that only imports the entities?[/color]

The real links for entities are:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-lat1.ent

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-symbol.ent

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-special.ent