retaining ENTITY declarations

arvin · July 21st, 2003, 02:46 AM

another problem, how do i retain the ENTITY declarations in an
XML-to-XML conversion using XSLT?

<xsl:output doctype-public="-//arvin//DTD myDocument v1.0//EN//XML" doctype-system="myDTD.dtd"/>
will output
<!DOCTYPE myDocument PUBLIC "-//arvin//DTD myDocument v1.0//EN//XML" SYSTEM "myDTD.dtd">.

but i need:
<!DOCTYPE myDocument PUBLIC "-//arvin//DTD myDocument v1.0//EN//XML" SYSTEM "myDTD.dtd" [
<!ENTITY abc SYSTEM abc NDATA image>
<!ENTITY xyz SYSTEM xyz NDATA image>
]>

how can make this happen?

Thanks! :)

armmarti · July 22nd, 2003, 12:54 AM

There is no way to output entity declarations by using "pure" XSLT features (an element in XSLT namespace, for example). The only way to solve the problem is to use "disable-output-escaping" attribute of the element "xsl:value-of" to output a markup.
By the way, in DOCTYPE declaration "SYSTEM" is not permitted if you want to specify both public and system IDs (as defined in the XML spec). And in your entity declarations the system IDs must be in quotation marks.
So, the code is:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:variable name="doc-type">
        <![CDATA[<!DOCTYPE myDocument PUBLIC "-//arvin//DTD myDocument v1.0//EN//XML" "myDTD.dtd" [
            <!ENTITY abc SYSTEM "abc" NDATA image>
            <!ENTITY xyz SYSTEM "xyz" NDATA image>]>]]>
    </xsl:variable>    

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:value-of select="$doc-type" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
        <myDocument>
            content
        </myDocument>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

It's assumed, of course, that myDTD.dtd and output.xml are in the same folder.

I hope this will help you.

Regards,
Armen

arvin · July 22nd, 2003, 10:47 PM

Thanks Armen. But my problem was i have several XML files (with ENTITY declarations) that i need to transform into differently-tagged XML files but i need to retain those ENTITY declarations within their respective "transformed" XML files.

armmarti · July 23rd, 2003, 01:51 AM

I can offer one solution, though it needs to change your source XML documents slightly:

You can add some element, say having element type "doc-type", to XML sources, like this:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE myDocument PUBLIC "-//arvin//DTD myDocument v1.0//EN//XML" "myDTD.dtd" [
<!ENTITY abc SYSTEM "abc" NDATA image>
<!ENTITY xyz SYSTEM "xyz" NDATA image>]>
<root>

  <doc-type>
    <![CDATA[<!DOCTYPE myDocument PUBLIC "-//arvin//DTD myDocument v1.0//EN//XML" "myDTD.dtd" [
             <!ENTITY abc SYSTEM "abc" NDATA image>
             <!ENTITY xyz SYSTEM "xyz" NDATA image>]>]]>  
  </doc-type>
  <!--
   ...
  --> 
</root>

Then you can use "disable-output-escaping" attribute again to output the stuff as markup.

Since you have no access to unparsed entity declarations in the XSLT data model, the only way(at least, the most obvious way for me) you can pass your entity-declarations through XSLT transformation to output XML document is to wrap them into some element.

Regards,
Armen