After spending a good deal of time with Uncle Google and some of his
friends, I still have unanswered problems using NSXMLParser with an XML file
that has entities in it. It appears that most of my questions have been asked
over the last few years, but I haven't found any postings about a resolution to
them. I'm hoping that someone can enlighten me as to whether I'm doing
something wrong, or there's some unresolved bug in the class.
The XML files I'm working with have HTML-like entities, such as
and " in them. Without any changes to my XML delegate, this chokes it with
the expected NSXMLParserUndeclaredEntityError (26) as I try to parse them. For
example's sake, let's say I have this XML file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<important_data>
<faq>
<question>Why are there so many blank spaces?</question>
<answer>Because I love to use in addition to
regular spaces</answer>
</faq>
</important_data>
With this, I get my error #26 after the first entity. My first
attempt to remedy this was to implement
-parser:resolveExternalEntityName:systemID: in my delegate object. This is
successfully called, and I return (for these testing purposes) an NSData object
to contain   (using [@" " dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] to
build the data).
Looking in my -parser:foundCharacters: method I can see that this value
gets passed back and the characters are "found" by the parser. But immediately
after that I still get the undeclared entity error, and parsing fails. I tried
this both with the parser set to resolve external entities and without, with
the same results.
I next looked to setting up the entities in a DTD, and references that
directly in the XML file. I borrowed a DTD I found online that defined the HTML
entities I needed (basically one that included for this test) and added
the necessary lines in the XML to have it included. This had 3 effects:
1. I got notifications in my delegate for the
foundInternalEntityDeclarationWithName notification.
2. My delegate stopped having its resolveExternalEntityName method
called (not surprising given the fact that the parser was telling me that it
was finding internal declarations).
3. I no longer got parse errors.
BUT, nothing is being substituted in for the entities. I even went so
far as to set up the DTD so that nbsp mapped to "a big test string", and
confirmed that no substitutions were happening.
My current stopgap is to do string replacements for the entities that I
know are showing up. I would prefer to let the parser handle it, rather than
have to look for and replace hundreds of HTML entities that most likely don't
exist, but could. I'd greatly appreciate any help on resolving this; it seems
like such a basic task that it shouldn't be a bug in NSXMLParser, but I can't
see where I'm doing things wrong. Hopefully I've given enough information for
someone to chip in and give me a hand.
Thanks in advance.
Greg
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