"poisondart" <poisondart985@g...> wrote:

> Is there a predefined entity set for Spanish accents?

No. Unlike HTML, XML has predefined entities for very few characters 
only ("markup-significant" characters like "<").

> I know that I
> could just easily make one, except that I intend to do this for other
> languages in the future, which may have more accents than Spanish.

The entities for Latin-1 characters as defined in HTML cover the 
accented characters of Spanish and a lot more. Their names have been 
taken from the SGML standard, and there's little reason to invent your 
own names for them instead - even though many of the names are just
half-mnemonic, or even misleading. The SGML standard also lists many 
other entities for characters, and there's a pattern in the naming of 
accented characters.

> What is the usual/preferred method that you employ to render special
> characters? I'm trying NOT to reinvent the wheel.

XML is based on Unicode (formally, ISO 10646) as regards to characters,
and in that sense there are just characters, not special characters.
So this is probably basically an authoring tool problem. Surely you 
would like to write and see all characters as such, not as entity 
references?

If you think you cannot use all characters as such due to some 
restrictions that apply to data transfer or processing - in this case, 
that would seem to me that some external obstacle forces you to use
ASCII characters only in an XML file or datastream - then you can 
hopefully find a way to do a suitable conversion _upon sending_
your XML somewhere. That is, you would work with UTF-8 and a Unicode-
capable editor but convert the data to a more primitive form for 
sending over some connection or to some program. In that case, I would 
suggest using character references (&#xN; where N is the Unicode number 
of the character) rather than entities. No need to invent or find names 
then, and no fear of incorrect processing on an XML processor that does 
not read your entity declarations.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/