Including Text Files
By default, the XInclude processor assumes the document pointed to by an
href
attribute is a well-formed XML
document. This document is parsed, and the content of the included
document replaces the xi:include
element in the including document. However, it is also nice to be able
to include unparsed text when assembling a larger document. For
instance, the program and XML examples in this book could be included
directly from their source form. If you add a parse
attribute to an xi:include
element with the value text
, then the document will be loaded as
plain text and not parsed. For example, this element includes Example 12-1 as plain text,
without parsing it:
<xi:include
href="http://cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/examples/12/12-1.xml"
parse="text"
/>
When parse="text
“, it is no
longer necessary for the referenced document to be well-formed.
Indeed, it need not be an XML document at all. It can be C source
code, an email message, a classic HTML document, or almost anything
else. The only restriction is that the included document must not
contain any completely illegal characters, such as an ASCII NUL, or an
unmatched half of a surrogate pair.
XInclude processors make use of any protocol metadata such as
HTTP headers to determine the encoding of a referenced document so
they can transcode it into Unicode before including it. If external
metadata is not available, but the MIME media type is text/xml
, application/xml
, or some type that ends in
+xml
, then the processor ...
Get XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.