The problem you're running into is that a non-validating XML parser is not
required to resolve external entities.  So if the RSS feed reader in
question is using a non-validating parser, it may fail to include an
external entity.

There is now a standard mechanism for including external files called
XInclude, but it is not yet widely supported.  There are other ways of
getting the same effect, but again they may not work for all RSS feed
readers.

Your best bet is probably to do it on the server side.  Run a script on
your server to combine the two files and make them available at a URL.

Chris Gray

On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Craig Hagerman wrote:

> Hi,
> I am pretty new to XML and trying to learn more. I am trying to figure
> out if something is possible, and if so how to do it...
>
> I created a bash script on my server to create an xml / rss file of
> podcasts as they are updated. What I wanted to do was have two files
> which are merged such that
>
> 1. podcasts.xml contains ONLY <item>s of podcasts. This was I just
> just append new podcasts to the end of this file.
>
> 2. feed.list/xml-dev/index.rss contains everything else and is the external link.
>
> (I had been thinking in PHP terms perhaps when I thought this out.)
> After a bunch of searching and reading tutorials I THOUGHT that using
> an <ENTITY> would do the trick for this... but no luck. Can anyone
> tell me if it is possible to include / call / reference  another file
> from within an xml file... and if so how I am supposed to do it?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Craig Hagerman
>
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