Use special characters in a DTD

Question

Hello,
I created a DTD amd want to use some special characters in this DTD. E.G. I want to define:
<!ATTLIST element value (val1|val 2|<val3>|%val4) #REQUIRED>
I tried the following but the parser does not accept without errors:
<!ATTLIST element value (val1|val&#xxx;2|&#yyy;val3&#zzz;....
Of course I replaced the xxx, yyy and zzz with the unicode number of the special sign.
So what do I do wrong? Or is it in general not possible to use special characters ?
Thank you very much,
Findus

Answer 1

Hi,
one thing I did which does not work is:
<!ATTLIST element values (&|<|val1) #REQUIRED>
The XML parser (XMLSpy) alway requires me for entering a '%' which is as far as I know only used for parameter entities. But & and the rest are general entities, aren't they ??
I played arround a little bit and found a solution which still does not completly solve my problem: In order to use special characters I declare parameter entities:
<!ENTITY percent "&#37;">
<!ENTITY lower "&#60;">
<!ATTLIST element values (%lower;|val1|%percent;) #REQUIRED>
This works so far so good but if I want to embed the special characters (which is what I need to do!) the parser still gives me errors:
<!ATTLIST element values (text%lower;moreText|val1|%percent;) #REQUIRED>
I would be really glad if anybody could test this on his own and post me about the results. For any other kind of avice I'm very thankful, too.
Thank you very much,
Findus