Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

EntityReference

Synopsis

This interface represents a reference from an XML document to an entity defined in the document’s DTD. Character entities and predefined entities such as < are always expanded in XML documents and do not create EntityReference nodes. Note also that some XML parsers expand all entity references. Documents created by such parsers do not contain EntityReference nodes.

This interface defines no methods of its own. The getNodeName( ) method of the Node interface provides the name of the referenced entity. The getEntities( ) method of the DocumentType interface provides a way to look up the Entity object associated with that name. Note however, that the DocumentType may not contain an Entity with the specified name (because, for example, nonvalidating XML parsers are not required to parse the external subset of the DTD.) In this case, the EntityReference is a reference to a named entity whose content is not known, and it has no children. On the other hand, if the DocumentType does contain an Entity node with the specified name, then the child nodes of the EntityReference are a copy of the child nodes of the Entity, and represent the expansion of the entity. (The children of an EntityReference may not be an exact copy of the children of an Entity if the entity’s expansion includes namespace prefixes that are not bound to namespace URIs.)

Like Entity nodes, EntityReference nodes and their descendants are read-only and cannot be edited or modified.

Figure 21-11. org.w3c.dom.EntityReference ...