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10: </style><title>Entities or no entities</title></head><body bgcolor="#8b7765" text="#000000" link="#a06060" vlink="#000000"><table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" align="center"><tr><td width="120"><a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/"><img src="epatents.png" alt="Action against software patents" /></a></td><td width="180"><a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img src="gnome2.png" alt="Gnome2 Logo" /></a><a href="http://www.w3.org/Status"><img src="w3c.png" alt="W3C Logo" /></a><a href="http://www.redhat.com/"><img src="redhat.gif" alt="Red Hat Logo" /></a><div align="left"><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/"><img src="Libxml2-Logo-180x168.gif" alt="Made with Libxml2 Logo" /></a></div></td><td><table border="0" width="90%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" align="center" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#fffacd"><tr><td align="center"><h1>The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome</h1><h2>Entities or no entities</h2></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="100%" align="center"><tr><td bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="100%"><tr><td valign="top" width="200" bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Developer Menu</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><form action="search.php" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="get"><input name="query" type="text" size="20" value="" /><input name="submit" type="submit" value="Search ..." /></form><ul><li><a href="index.html" style="font-weight:bold">Main Menu</a></li><li><a href="html/index.html" style="font-weight:bold">Reference Manual</a></li><li><a href="examples/index.html" style="font-weight:bold">Code Examples</a></li><li><a href="guidelines.html">XML Guidelines</a></li><li><a href="tutorial/index.html">Tutorial</a></li><li><a href="xmlreader.html">The Reader Interface</a></li><li><a href="ChangeLog.html">ChangeLog</a></li><li><a href="XSLT.html">XSLT</a></li><li><a href="python.html">Python and bindings</a></li><li><a href="architecture.html">libxml2 architecture</a></li><li><a href="tree.html">The tree output</a></li><li><a href="interface.html">The SAX interface</a></li><li><a href="xmlmem.html">Memory Management</a></li><li><a href="xmlio.html">I/O Interfaces</a></li><li><a href="library.html">The parser interfaces</a></li><li><a href="entities.html">Entities or no entities</a></li><li><a href="namespaces.html">Namespaces</a></li><li><a href="upgrade.html">Upgrading 1.x code</a></li><li><a href="threads.html">Thread safety</a></li><li><a href="DOM.html">DOM Principles</a></li><li><a href="example.html">A real example</a></li><li><a href="xml.html">flat page</a>, <a href="site.xsl">stylesheet</a></li></ul></td></tr></table><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>API Indexes</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><ul><li><a href="APIchunk0.html">Alphabetic</a></li><li><a href="APIconstructors.html">Constructors</a></li><li><a href="APIfunctions.html">Functions/Types</a></li><li><a href="APIfiles.html">Modules</a></li><li><a href="APIsymbols.html">Symbols</a></li></ul></td></tr></table><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Related links</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><ul><li><a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">Mail archive</a></li><li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">XSLT libxslt</a></li><li><a href="http://phd.cs.unibo.it/gdome2/">DOM gdome2</a></li><li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">XML-DSig xmlsec</a></li><li><a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">FTP</a></li><li><a href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/">Windows binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://opencsw.org/packages/libxml2">Solaris binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://www.explain.com.au/oss/libxml2xslt.html">MacOsX binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://codespeak.net/lxml/">lxml Python bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/XML-LibXML">Perl bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">C++ bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-xmlphp.php#Heading4">PHP bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas/">Pascal bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://libxml.rubyforge.org/">Ruby bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">Tcl bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">Bug Tracker</a></li></ul></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td><td valign="top" bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%"><tr><td><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="100%"><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
11: abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
12: content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
13: may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
14: document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
15: beginning). Example:</p><pre>1 <?xml version="1.0"?>
16: 2 <!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
17: 3 <!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language">
18: 4 ]>
19: 5 <EXAMPLE>
20: 6 &xml;
21: 7 </EXAMPLE></pre><p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
22: its name with '&' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
23: are 5 predefined entities in libxml2 allowing you to escape characters with
24: predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
25: <strong>&lt;</strong> for the character '<', <strong>&gt;</strong>
26: for the character '>', <strong>&apos;</strong> for the character ''',
27: <strong>&quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
28: <strong>&amp;</strong> for the character '&'.</p><p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
29: substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
30: your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
31: content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
32: precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
33: defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
34: substitute them as saving time). The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html#xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
35: function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
36: substitute entities by default.</p><p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml2 for the previous document in the
37: default case:</p><pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -> ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
38: DOCUMENT
39: version=1.0
40: ELEMENT EXAMPLE
41: TEXT
42: content=
43: ENTITY_REF
44: INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
45: content=Extensible Markup Language
46: TEXT
47: content=</pre><p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p><pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -> ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
48: DOCUMENT
49: version=1.0
50: ELEMENT EXAMPLE
51: TEXT
52: content= Extensible Markup Language</pre><p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
53: suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
54: entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
55: entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p><p>Note that at save time libxml2 enforces the conversion of the predefined
56: entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
57: transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
58: reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
59: finding them in the input).</p><p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
60: on top of the libxml2 SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
61: non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning curve to handle
62: then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
63: strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
64: deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p><p><a href="bugs.html">Daniel Veillard</a></p></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body></html>
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