I'm working on a program that uses REXML to parse SVG. One of the test
programs declares this entity:
<!ENTITY shape " <path d='M60,0 l60,0 l60,60 l0,60 l-60,60 l-60,0
l-60,-60 l0,-60 z'/>">
]>
Then later it refers to the entity like this:
<g fill="yellow" stroke="red" stroke-width="8" >&shape;</g>
How do I get REXML to replace &shape; with its value and then parse it?
Tim Hunter wrote:
I'm working on a program that uses REXML to parse SVG. One of the test
programs declares this entity:<!ENTITY shape " <path d='M60,0 l60,0 l60,60 l0,60 l-60,60 l-60,0
l-60,-60 l0,-60 z'/>">
]>Then later it refers to the entity like this:
<g fill="yellow" stroke="red" stroke-width="8" >&shape;</g>
How do I get REXML to replace &shape; with its value and then parse it?
The tutorial
http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/docs/tutorial.html
suggests that REXML does replace internal entity references, but that they are "unreplaced" when you go fetch the document content as a whole.
You can get the expanded text if you explicitly ask for a node's text value, but (it seems) asking for the entire document string gives back the unexpanded version.
Take a look at the tutorial, because REXML's behavior with regard to entities is probably not what you expect. For example, simply reading a text value may alter your source document if a node being read contains text that matches the value of an internal entity. (Though this tutorial description does not match the actual behavior of some short code I wrote to see this in action, so the tutorial may be out of date, or my code is buggy.)
James