R – Flash as3 process XML Doctype Entities

actionscript-3apache-flexflashxml

i've got a XML similar to the following example:

<?xml  version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE descriptor-layout 
[
   <!ENTITY prefix "http://www.myurl.com" >
]>



<xml>
....
</xml>

the prefix Entity is used in several tags like this:

<child src="&prefix;/mypath/mydata.xml" />

So my question is, wether there is anyway to process the listed Entities automatically (like it's possible in PHP) or if the only way to replace the &prefix; tags in the document is to do this by hand?

Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

I'm pretty sure that AS3 does not come with your requested functionality out of the box. In fact, to even get at the DOCTYPE information, you may have to use the legacy class, XMLDocument.

XML escape characters

There are only five:

"   &quot;
'   &apos;
<   &lt;
>   &gt;
&   &amp;

Escaping characters depends on where the special character is used.

The examples can be validated at the W3C Markup Validation Service.

Text

The safe way is to escape all five characters in text. However, the three characters ", ' and > needn't be escaped in text:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>"'></valid>

Attributes

The safe way is to escape all five characters in attributes. However, the > character needn't be escaped in attributes:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute=">"/>

The ' character needn't be escaped in attributes if the quotes are ":

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute="'"/>

Likewise, the " needn't be escaped in attributes if the quotes are ':

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute='"'/>

Comments

All five special characters must not be escaped in comments:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>
<!-- "'<>& -->
</valid>

CDATA

All five special characters must not be escaped in CDATA sections:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>
<![CDATA["'<>&]]>
</valid>

Processing instructions

All five special characters must not be escaped in XML processing instructions:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?process <"'&> ?>
<valid/>

XML vs. HTML

HTML has its own set of escape codes which cover a lot more characters.

Html – How to escape ampersands in XML so they are rendered as entities in HTML

When your XML contains &amp;, this will result in the text &.

When you use that in HTML, that will be rendered as &.