XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Internal text entities

The simplest kind of declared entity is an internal text entity. This type of entity allows a document author to pre-define any phrase or other text fragment that will be used repeatedly in the document. For example, in a book on XML the name 'eXtensible Markup Language' may appear often. To avoid keying the whole name, and also to prevent inconsistencies and misspellings that may result from this tedious task, an internal text entity may be created to hold the text.

But internal text entities are most commonly used to represent unusual characters that cannot be accessed from the keyboard, or are represented by different character values on different computer systems. It may be easier and safer to create and transfer data ...