Re: [docbook] How to determine supported entities

[Bob Stayton <bobs@sagehill.net>]

Have you considered making the address of common.ent in its parameter entity reference a URL referencing a website? That would make it read-only, maintainable in one location, and instantly updated to all users.

<!ENTITY % common_entities SYSTEM "http://redhat.com/somepathto/common.ent" >

That wouldn't prevent someone from adding entity declarations to their XML file to override particular entities, though.

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net

On 4/2/2019 4:34 PM, David O'Brien wrote:

Is there a way to differentiate between (what I call) "natively
supported entities" (  < > ™ and all those) and what we
add in .ent files?

In our projects we normally have one /Common/common.ent file where we
define numerous entities. This is shared across all projects. What we
want to do is make sure people don't add to this file, resulting in
different versions for different projects. This file, combined with the
natively supported entities, would constitute a "whitelist" of entities.

We've done something similar with DocBook elements, where we have a
whitelist of supported elements (we don't use the entire 4.5 schema) and
if our script hits a "black" element it throws a warning. To do the same
with entities means we'd have a *very* long whitelist just for the
natively supported entities.

Perhaps there is a better way?