July 2004
Intermediate to advanced
479 pages
12h 30m
English
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Use Character and Entity References
Not all characters are available on the keyboard! This hack shows you how to represent such characters in an XML document by using decimal and hexadecimal character references, and how to represent entities by using entity references.
In XML, character and entity references are formed by surrounding a
numerical value or a name with & and
;—for example, ©
is a decimal character reference and © is
an entity reference. This hack shows you how to use both.
Character References
According to the third and latest edition of the XML 1.0 specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/), XML processors must accept over 1,000,000 hexadecimal characters (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charsets). It’s possible that you won’t be able to find all those characters on your keyboard! Don’t worry. You can use character references instead.
Tip
You can look up the semantics of individual Unicode characters at http://www.unicode.org/charts/.
You can reference characters using either decimal or hexadecimal numbers. Which one you use is a matter of style. The document Namen.xml uses both (Example 1-5); it contains some German names enclosed in German language tags.
Example 1-5. Namen.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml-stylesheet href="Namen.css" type="text/css"?> <Namen xml:lang="de"> <Name> <Vorname>Marie</Vorname> <Nachname>Müller</Nachname> <Geschlecht>♀</Geschlecht> </Name> <Name> <Vorname>Klaus</Vorname> <Nachname>Müller</Nachname> ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.