XML Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition

Character, Entity, and Predefined Entity References

Character, entity, and predefined entity references refer respectively to (1) a specific character in the ISO/IEC 10646 or Unicode character set (especially one not readily accessible through the keyboard), (2) a named entity, and (3) any one of the five predefined XML entities.

Productions

[4] NameChar::= Letter | Digit | '.' | '-' | '_' | ':' | CombiningChar | Extender 1.0
[4] NameStartChar ::= ":" | [A-Z] | "_" | [a-z] | [#xC0-#xD6] | [#xD8-#xF6] |
[#xF8-#x2FF] | [#x370-#x37D] | [#x37F-#x1FFF] | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] |
[#x2C00-#x2FEF] | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD] |
[#x10000-#xEFFFF] 1.1
[4a] NameChar ::= NameStartChar | "-" | "." | [0-9] | #xB7 | [#x0300-#x036F] |
[#x203F-#x2040] 1.1
[5] Name::= (Letter | '_' | ':') (NameChar)* 1.0
[5] Name ::= NameStartChar (NameChar)* 1.1
[66] CharRef ::= '&#' [0-9]+ ';' | '&#x' [0-9a-fA-F]+ ';'
[67] Reference ::= EntityRef | CharRef
[68] EntityRef ::= '&' Name ';'

Examples

<para>The &#182; symbol marks the beginning of a paragraph.</para>

<para>The &#xB6; symbol marks the beginning of a paragraph.</para>

<p>&copy; O'Reilly Media, Inc.</p>

<comparison>&quot;a &lt; b &gt; &amp; a=c&quot;
</comparison>

Description

In XML, character and entity references are formed by surrounding a numerical value or name with & and ;, as in ©, ©, or ©.

Character references

You can write character references in decimal or hexadecimal form, though each is written in ...