Text Declarations

Instead of an XML declaration, an external entity may have a text declaration; this looks a lot like an XML declaration. The main difference is that in a text declaration the encoding declaration is required, while the version attribute is optional. Furthermore, there is no standalone declaration. The main purpose of the text declaration is to tell the parser what character set the entity is encoded in. For example, this is a common text declaration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="MacRoman"?>

However, you could also use this text declaration with no version attribute:

<?xml encoding="MacRoman"?>

Example 3-5 is a well-formed external entity that could be included from another document using an external general entity reference.

Example 3-5. An external parsed entity
<?xml encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
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