On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 7:26 AM, Mike Sokolov <sokolov@i...> wrote:

> After all the discussion about "What is data?" I don't know if this list is
> the place to discuss actual details of implementation, but please feel free
> to send me elsewhere if you can think of a better venue.
>

For my part, I find it refreshing a place where one can discuss such
fundamental matters as well as the lineaments of running code.  I think
you'll find in the archives plenty of discussion of code, and plenty of
code-free discussion alike.



> I have a need to handle XML that references a non-existent DTD.  The DTD is
> irrelevant to the actual processing of the XML, and isn't available
> anywhere, but it is declared in in the DOCTYPE.  I'm sure many of you have
> encountered this situation: it's practically the norm, in my experience.
>
> After years of dealing with this inherently unsatisfactory situation in a
> variety of ways, I came up with a new one that I am liking at the moment,
> which is to insert a Stream into a Java XML processing stack that strips out
> the prolog of the XML document before handing it off to a parser.  This has
> the nice property that it doesn't require modifications to the stored XML
> files.  It loses PIs and comments and the XML decl, but I can live with
> that.
>

Expat allows you to specify a standalone flag, which in effect expunges all
external parameter entity declarations (and other such external resources
incompatible with standalone="yes").  This certainly skates the edges of XML
spec compliance, but I think it's legit, because I see it as an implicit
transform.  Anyway, your Java tools might have the equivalent.  FWIW, I know
that Jython 2.5 includes Expat wrapped for the core XMl libs, so that might
be an option.

In Amara 2.x we expose this flag very conveniently.  You can do:

import amara
doc = amara.parse(myxml, standalone=True) #flag uses boolean values, not
strings

And it will in effect ignore those pesky parameter entitiy decls, including
declarations of external subset.

The rest of your post is Java-specific, so I'll snip and run like hell :)


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