Entity (W3C DOM Core object)
| Version | Depr. | Parent |
|---|---|---|
| DOM1 | No | Node |
| IE5.5+ | FF3 | SA3 | OP9+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buggy | None | None | Partial |
Example
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"
[
<!ENTITY hawk "MC Hawking">
<!ENTITY snoop "Snoop Doggy Dogg">
]>
The example above shows an XHTML 1.0 Strict DocumentType with additional entities defined in the internalSubset. We can get a reference to all
the entities declared in the DTD using the entities collection, which itself is a property
of the doctype:
var entities = document.doctype.entities;And
then retrieve individual items from that collection using the getNamedItem method:
entities.getNamedItem('sitepoint')The
entities collection should include both
internal and external entities, however in practise this varies by browser
(see the Compatibility notes below for details).
Description
The
Entity interface inherits from Node, and represents an expanded entity, ie. the entity
itself (eg. &), not the entity reference (eg.
amp); entity references are controlled by the EntityReference interface.
The DOM does not require
an implementation to expand external entities, hence the replacement value
of an entity reference may not be available; if it is available it will
appear in the childNodes collection of the EntityReference.
Conversely, an implementation may
choose to expand all entities before building the DOM tree, in which case
there will be no EntityReference nodes in the document
at all, only Entity nodes.
Entity nodes and their descendents are
read-only, and can only be modified at the EntityReference level.
An Entity
node can have Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text, CDATASection and EntityReference nodes as children.
Compatibility
| Internet Explorer | Firefox | Safari | Opera | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.5 | 6.0 | 7.0 | 1.5 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 1.3 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 9.0 | 9.5 |
| Buggy | Buggy | Buggy | None | None | None | None | None | None | Partial | Partial |
Only
Internet Explorer in XML and Opera
in XHTML mode or XML1 provide data for the entities collection; in
Firefox, Safari 1.3 and 2 in XHTML
mode or XML, and Safari 3 the
collection is null; in other environments the doctype itself is null or
undefined (see DocumentType for details).
In
Internet Explorer in XML this collection only
includes internal entities (those defined in a doctype's internal subset);
external entities are not included. Furthermore, it doesn't support
associative array syntax for retrieving members by name (eg.
entities['hawk']); it only supports reference by index
(eg. entities[0]) or using the getNamedItem method of NamedNodeMap (eg.
entities.getNamedItem('hawk')).
In this Section
- notationName
The name of the associated notation (for an unparsed entity). - publicId
The public identifier of an Entity. - systemId
The system identifier of an Entity or Notation, and in DOM 2 of a DocumentType.
Footnotes
1 On XHTML pages served as
application/xhtml+xml.
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