Parsing of an entity if it appears as an attribute value.

[Vineeth]

Hi,

I am developing an application using the SAX interface provided by "xerces-j 2.6.0". My application does not need a DTD for execution as it is not supposed to perform any validation. I have to provide customized entity processing for which I have implemented the startEntity function of the LexicalHandler interface. The problem that I am facing is with respect to any entity other than the 5 builtin ones. If any entity for example &abcd; which is not a built-in entity is specified in the content of any element then it gets successfully processed using the customized entity resolution provided in the startEntity function, but if the same entity occurs in the value of an attribute then it is not getting processed. In such cases the startEntity function is also not getting called. On looking up the value of the attribute in the startElement callback, I found that the entity is not being passed on instead it is being consumed. Only the five built-in entites if they are present are returned back in the call-back.

I would be grateful if anybody can suggest a solution for this peculiar problem.

Thankx,
Vineeth

 

[Richard Tobin]

My application does not need a DTD for execution as
it is not supposed to perform any validation.

But then you say:

The problem that
I am facing is with respect to any entity other than the 5 builtin ones.

So you *do* need a DTD. DTD's aren't just for validation. If you want to use non-built-in entities, you need a DTD. Even if you managed to hack around it, you would not be using XML, but a proprietary variant.

Why not use a DTD?

-- Richard

 

[Vineeth Narayanan]

Hi Richard,

I have written my own entity resolver and I will be using it to resolve the entities. I donot have any dependency on the DTD. What I need is a way to get at the non normalized value of the attribute. Moreover I have a large number of DTD's due to which I donot want to keep dependency of the conversion process on the DTD.

Thanks
Vineeth

 

[Vineeth]

But then you say:

So you *do* need a DTD. DTD's aren't just for validation. If you want to use non-built-in entities, you need a DTD. Even if you managed to hack around it, you would not be using XML, but a proprietary variant.

Why not use a DTD?

-- Richard

Hi Richard,

The problem with DTD is that my application does not have access to the DTD. The basic functionality of my application is to convert the XML document into a text based format document. I have written an entityResolver implementing the Lexicalhandler interface, this Resolver is called if the entity occurs in the content but it does not get called up if the entity occur as an attribute value.

I somehow need access to the NonNormalized value of the attribute.

Any suggestions are welcome.

--Vineeth