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Re: Nested Entities...


/ James Oden <joden@eworld.wox.org> was heard to say:
| My problem is, as far as I understand it an external entity must be
| declared within the doctype, and having a doctype in both the customer
| doc, and the error code doc, causes parsing of the error code doc to fail.
| 
| What can I do?

Not much. XML 1.0 by itself does not support what you want to do.
XInclude might, but then you'd need XInclude-aware processors and
there aren't any of those :-)

| P.S. I am very new to docbook and to xml/sgml so if this seems 
| like a stupid question forgive me (if it seems like a newbie 
| question, well I am newbie so that would be appropriate).  I did
| try to search the archive though before I posted the question.

No, it's not a stupid question. You could argue that it's a stupid
bug, but that' would be a different line of argument... :-)

Basically, your only hope is to decompose things further.

If you want 

  A to include B
  B to include C

and you want A and B to both stand alone, you need to do something
like this.

  1. Construct B-content to hold everything in B except the <!DOCTYPE
     declaration and the root node.

     This means that B-content contains an entity reference to C,
     but no definition for it. Unfortunate, but true.

  2. In B, include entity declarations for B-content and C, then
     make it <root>&B-content;</root>

  3. In A, include entity declarations for B-conetnt and C, then
     make it <root>whatever content you want &B-content; in addition
     to B.</root>

Does that help?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | The man with ten children is
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | better off than the one with ten
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | thousand fonts of type, because
                                   | the man with ten children doesn't
                                   | want any more.

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