CDATA by any other name... (was The raw and the cooked)

[david at megginson.com]

Richard Tobin writes:

 > Note that the XML 1.0 recommendation requires that character and
 > internal entities be expanded before passing the data to the
 > application.

It doesn't forbid the parser from informing the application about what
has been expanded.  In an event-based API, for example, for

  text &foo; text  

the parser could deliver an event stream like

  characters("text ")
  startEntityRef("foo")
  characters("entity value")
  endEntityRef("foo")
  characters(" text")

For normal downstream processing, this level of reporting is simply a
waste of resources, but it could be essential for authoring tools.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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