org.w3c.dom.Entity Maven / Gradle / Ivy

/*
 * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,
 *
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for
 * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This
 * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that
 * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
 * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
 *
 * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**
 * This interface represents a known entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an
 * XML document. Note that this models the entity itself not the entity declaration.
 * The nodeName attribute that is inherited from
 * Node contains the name of the entity.
 * 
An XML processor may choose to completely expand entities before the
 * structure model is passed to the DOM; in this case there will be no
 * EntityReference nodes in the document tree.
 * 
XML does not mandate that a non-validating XML processor read and
 * process entity declarations made in the external subset or declared in
 * parameter entities. This means that parsed entities declared in the
 * external subset need not be expanded by some classes of applications, and
 * that the replacement text of the entity may not be available. When the 
 * replacement text is available, the corresponding Entity node's child list
 * represents the structure of that replacement value. Otherwise, the child
 * list is empty.
 * 
DOM Level 3 does not support editing Entity nodes; if a
 * user wants to make changes to the contents of an Entity,
 * every related EntityReference node has to be replaced in the
 * structure model by a clone of the Entity's contents, and
 * then the desired changes must be made to each of those clones instead.
 * Entity nodes and all their descendants are readonly.
 * 
An Entity node does not have any parent.
 * 
Note: If the entity contains an unbound namespace prefix, the
 * namespaceURI of the corresponding node in the
 * Entity node subtree is null. The same is true
 * for EntityReference nodes that refer to this entity, when
 * they are created using the createEntityReference method of
 * the Document interface.
 * See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification.
 */
public interface Entity extends Node {
    /**
     * The public identifier associated with the entity if specified, and
     * null otherwise.
     */
    public String getPublicId();

    /**
     * The system identifier associated with the entity if specified, and
     * null otherwise. This may be an absolute URI or not.
     */
    public String getSystemId();

    /**
     * For unparsed entities, the name of the notation for the entity. For
     * parsed entities, this is null.
     */
    public String getNotationName();

    /**
     * An attribute specifying the encoding used for this entity at the time
     * of parsing, when it is an external parsed entity. This is
     * null if it an entity from the internal subset or if it
     * is not known.
     * @since DOM Level 3
     */
    public String getInputEncoding();

    /**
     * An attribute specifying, as part of the text declaration, the encoding
     * of this entity, when it is an external parsed entity. This is
     * null otherwise.
     * @since DOM Level 3
     */
    public String getXmlEncoding();

    /**
     * An attribute specifying, as part of the text declaration, the version
     * number of this entity, when it is an external parsed entity. This is
     * null otherwise.
     * @since DOM Level 3
     */
    public String getXmlVersion();

}