XML Document

Entities

The content of an element can include entities. An entity is shorthand for a piece of text. Entities are declared in the DTD (see the previous section) and have a name and a content. In addition, entities are inserted in the document between the & and ; characters .

Assuming the entity axs was declared with the content Applied XML Solutions , the parser will resolve

 <title>&axs;</title> 

as

 <title>Applied XML Solutions</title> 

Predefined Entities

XML predefines a small number of entities to escape special characters:

• &lt; ”Stands for <

• &amp; ”Stands for &

• &gt; ”Stands for >

• &apos; ”Stands for '

• &quot; ”Stands for "

Character Entities

XML also defines character entities. A character entity references a single Unicode character. They are typically used to call characters that are not legal in the current encoding.

The name of character entities has the form # number , where number is the Unicode code for the character. For example, is Unicode character 169 , so

 <notice>&#169; 2000, Pineapplesoft</notice> 

is equivalent to

 <notice> 2000, Pineapplesoft</notice>