<!ENTITY super "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious">
Once that's done, you can use
&super; anywhere you'd
normally have to type the entire word (and probably misspell it).
Entities can contain markup as well as text. For example, this
declaration defines &footer; as an
abbreviation for a standard web-page footer that will be repeated on
many pages:
<!ENTITY footer '<hr size="1" noshade="true"/>
<font CLASS="footer">
<a href="index.html">O'Reilly Home</a> |
<a href="sales/bookstores/">O'Reilly Bookstores</a> |
<a href="order_new/">How to Order</a> |
<a href="oreilly/contact.html">O'Reilly Contacts</a><br>
<a href="http://international.oreilly.com/">International</a> |
<a href="oreilly/about.html">About O'Reilly</a> |
<a href="affiliates.html">Affiliated Companies</a>
</font>
<p>
<font CLASS="copy">
Copyright 2000, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.<br/>
<a href="mailto:webmaster@oreilly.com">webmaster@oreilly.com</a>
</font>
</p>
'>
The entity replacement text must be well-formed. For instance, you
cannot put a start-tag in one entity and the corresponding end-tag in
another entity.
The other thing you have to be careful about is that you need to use
different quote marks inside the replacement text from the ones that
delimit it. Here we've chosen single quotes to
surround the replacement text and double quotes internally. However,
we did have to change the single quote in
"O'Reilly" to the
predefined general entity reference '.
Replacement text may itself contain entity references that are
resolved before the text is replaced. However, self-referential and
circular references are forbidden.
General entities insert replacement text into the body of an XML
document. They can also be used inside the DTD in places where they
will eventually be included in the body of an XML document, for
instance in an attribute default value or in the replacement text of
another entity. However, they cannot be used to provide the text of
the DTD itself. For instance, this is illegal:
Shortly, we'll see how to use a different kind of
entity--the parameter entity--to achieve the desired
result.
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3.3. Attribute Declarations | ![Book Index](../gifs/index.gif) | 3.5. External Parsed General Entities |