Horst Gutmann wrote: > I currently have quite a big problem with minidom and special chars > (for example ü) in HTML.
Yes. Ignoring the issue of the wrong doctype, minidom is a pure XML parser and knows nothing of XHTML and its doctype's entities 'uuml' and the like. Only the built-in entities (& etc.) will work. Unfortunately the parser minidom uses won't read external entities - including the external subset of the DTD (which is where all the stuff about what "ü" means is stored). And because minidom does not support EntityReference nodes, the information that there was an entity reference there at all gets thrown away as it is replaced with the empty string. Which is kind of bad. Possible workarounds: 1. pass minidom a different parser to use, one which supports external entities and which will parse all the DTD stuff. I don't know if there is anything suitable available, though... 2. use a DOM implementation with the option to support external entities. For example, with pxdom, one can use DOM Level 3 LS methods, or pxdom.parse(f, {'pxdom-external-entities': True}). However note that reading and parsing an external entity will introduce significant slowdown, especially in the case of the rather complex multi-file XHTML DTD. Other possibilities: 3. hack the content on the way into the parser to replace the DOCTYPE declaration with one including entity definitions in the internal subset: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "..." "..." [ <!ENTITY uuml "ü"> ... ]> <html>... 4. hack the content on the way into the parser to replace entity references with character references, eg. ü -> ü. This is 'safe' for simple documents without an internal subset; charrefs and entrefs can be used in the same places with the same meaning, except for some issues in the internal subset. 5. use a DOM implementation that supports EntityReference nodes, such as pxdom. Entity references with no replacement text (or all entity references if the DOM Level 3 LS parameter 'entities' is set) will exist as EntityReference DOM objects instead of being flattened to text. They can safely be reserialized as ü without the implementation having to know what text they represent. Entities are a big source of complication and confusion, which I wish had not made it into XML! -- Andrew Clover mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.doxdesk.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list