Thanks Oleg

I feared as much ... and glad to see that I wasn't missing something 
obvious.

I tried (just now) doing a string translation ... but since I'm wanting to 
replace < with << and > with >> .... I found it rather difficult to 
understand what all was happening.  After all ... I was looking for &lt; and 
asking it to replace with &lt;&lt;.  Even using literal and other codes, 
e.g., &#60; resulted in the same confusion.

So ... I think I'll just ask the author to give me "10 &lt;&lt; 100" when 
they want "10 < 100".  This way I don't have to worry about tranformation 
errors.

Thanks Oleg.

Yours,

Allan



"Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]" <oleg@NO!SPAM!PLEASEtkachenko.com> wrote in message 
news:eqFGzrLxEHA.3072@T......
> Allan Shearer wrote:
>
>> I'm struggling with trying to define custom replacements for the 'lt' and 
>> 'gt' predefined entities in the ISO_NUM.ent file.
>
> I don't think you can override predefined XML entirties. Here is what XML 
> spec says:
>
> "All XML processors MUST recognize these entities whether they are 
> declared or not. For interoperability, valid XML documents SHOULD declare 
> these entities, like any others, before using them. If the entities lt or 
> amp are declared, they MUST be declared as internal entities whose 
> replacement text is a character reference to the respective character 
> (less-than sign or ampersand) being escaped; the double escaping is 
> REQUIRED for these entities so that references to them produce a 
> well-formed result. If the entities gt, apos, or quot are declared, they 
> MUST be declared as internal entities whose replacement text is the single 
> character being escaped (or a character reference to that character; the 
> double escaping here is OPTIONAL but harmless). For example:
>
> <!ENTITY lt     "&#38;#60;">
> <!ENTITY gt     "&#62;">
> <!ENTITY amp    "&#38;#38;">
> <!ENTITY apos   "&#39;">
> <!ENTITY quot   "&#34;">.
> "
>
> Instead you can implement general string replace in your XSLT.
>
> -- 
> Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP]
> http://blog.tkachenko.com