DTD General Entities

A quick explanation on declaring general entities.

You may remember the lesson on creating entities. The entity we created in that lesson is known as a General Entity Reference. A general entity reference is used in the target XML document/s.

This lesson refreshes our memory on how to declare a general entity. The following lesson introduces another type of entity; the parameter entity.

Syntax

The <!ENTITY> declaration for general entities has the following syntax:

You can also declare external general entities. This enables you to use an entity from a remote file. You declare external general entities using the following syntax:

Private:

Public:

Example

After declaring the entity named author, we can now use it in our XML document: