XML Unleashed

Characters and Entities

Before getting into the details of how entities are declared and referenced, it's important to understand how characters are used in entities. More specifically, you need to have a solid grasp of character encoding, which is the manner in which characters are represented by bit patterns. This is important because XML is flexible enough to support a variety of different character encodings. The basis for XML character encoding is the ISO/IEC 10646 Unicode standard, which provides a great deal of flexibility in using characters in multiple languages.

In addition to the Unicode ISO/IEC 10646 standard, you are also free to use one of the ISO 8859 standards or the JIS X-0208-1997 standard. If these character encoding standards ...