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Why are double semicolons required when using character entities?

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BillyRayPreachersSon

BillyRayPreachersSon

Programmer
Dec 8, 2003
17,047
GB

This is driving me crazy... And I can't for the life of me work out why, or find any reference to this issue.

When loading data into an XML DOM, it seems that using character entities causes a problem. For example, " " causes the loadXML() method to fail. However, if I put 2 semicolons at the end: " ;", it works just fine!

I've built a simple test harness to show my problem:

Code: 
<html>
<head>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	<!--
		function testXMLLoad() {
			var myData = document.getElementById('myData').innerHTML;
			var xmlDoc = document.createElement('xml');
			if (!xmlDoc.loadXML(myData)) alert('Loading failed!');
		}
	//-->
	</script>
</head>
<body onload="testXMLLoad();">
	<object id="myData" data="" type="text/x-scriptlet">
		<myCustomTagSet>
			<customTag>A &amp; B</customTag>
		</myCustomTagSet>
	</object>
</body>
</html>

The above code will fail, but if you insert the extra semicolon, it works just fine.

Can anyone explain why this is so?

Thanks!
Dan
 
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I don't know why the double-semicolons are working for you -- sounds like a bug, honestly.

You said your file contains: [ignore]&nbsp;[/ignore], this is not one of the predefined XML entities, and it's probably confusing the parser. Try changing your .xml file so that it looks like: [ignore]&amp;nbsp;[/ignore].

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first
 
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It is not an XML file - it is an HTML file, as you can see from the code above.

I used "&nbsp;" in my description, but used "&amp;" in the code - but it really could be any HTML character entity. try the code and you'll see what I mean.

Dan
 
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nope, &nbsp; fails because it is a not a valid escape set for XML. &amp; doesn't fail because it is valid, so &amp;nbsp; will pass.

I just tried it using xmp tags and it worked fine (except for the nbsp).

Although i figured I should tell you that that method of loading the XML documnet isn't supported in Mozilla :)

01000111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01000011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111
Help, the rampaging, spear-waving, rabid network gnomes are after me!
 
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BillyRayPreachersSon -

Only the variantion of HTML called XHTML can be loaded into a DOM -- ordinary HTML cannot because of tags like <br> -- this is not valid XML. However, if it were coded like <br/>, then it would be able to.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first
 
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Granted.

But for the general case of loading HTML, that's a common problem. Often posters here will not include the entire part of their code that is causing problems, so that's why I mentioned it.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first
 
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I think the problem is that you use <object> tag to hold the xml data. Try use XML island to hold the XML data as follows, and it should work.

Code: 
<html>
<head>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    <!--
        function testXMLLoad() {
            var myData = document.getElementById('myData').innerHTML;
            var xmlDoc = document.createElement('xml');
            if (!xmlDoc.loadXML(myData)) alert('Loading failed!');
        }
    //-->
    </script>
</head>
<body onload="testXMLLoad();">
</body>
</html>

<xml id="myData">
    <myCustomTagSet>
        <customTag>A &amp; B</customTag>
    </myCustomTagSet>
</xml>
 
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Unfortunately, we need to use the object syntax, as it is a component that is placed on a page (the code above is a simplified version with enough detail to show the problem at hand).

Thanks for the suggestions though - I think we'll just end up putting ;; at the end of our codes, as it works just fine when we do that.

Dan
 
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