Entities

• An XML document is made up of one or more physical storage units called entities

• Entity references:

  • Parsed internal general entity references like &

  • Parsed external general entity references

  • Unparsed external general entity references

  • External parameter entity references

  • Internal parameter entity references

• Reading an XML document is not the same thing as reading an XML file

• The file contains entity references.

• The document contains the entities' replacement text.

• When you use a parser to read a document you'll get the text including characters like <. You will not see the entity references.