[ILUG] XML & UTF Encoding

[Brian Foster]

  | From: Stephane Dudzinski <stephane at antefacto.com>
  | Date: 24 Apr 2002 08:57:34 +0100
  |[ ... ]
  | I've been using xsltproc under Linux to translate documents from English
  | to French.
  | 
  | If i try to put any &eacute; &egrave; characters types, xml complains
  | when i build my html from xml saying :
  | ../xml/build.xml:16: error: Entity 'eacute' not defined
  | 
  | In order to get this error i indicated to XML that the type of encoding
  | was (and is) UTF-8 by modifying this tag :
  | <?xml version='1.0' encoding="UTF-8"?>

XML has only c.4 builtin entities (&amp and I cannot recall the
others), and &eacute et.al. are not them.  the codeset in which
the XML is written does not matter (AFAIK).

whilst I think it is possible to define your own XML entities,
a trick I have used in the past when writing XML that is known
to eventually be converted into HTML is to say:

   &amp;eacute;

the XML->HMTL conversion turns that into:

   &eacute;

which is exactly what you want --- and is codeset-independent.
your mileage may very.
cheers!
	-blf-
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