From:	Mohammed Khatib [mailto:mkhatib@[...].au]
>  Hi All,
>  
>  I am relatively new to XML so please excuse me if this 
>  question sounds rather trivial.
>  
>  I recently wrote an XML to Folio flat file converter (using 
>  Perl)

Do you mean that you wrote a Perl script that recognised XML
tags and entities?  If that is what you've done, I'd really
recommend you find out about existing XML parser modules.
Here's a link:

  http://perl-xml.sourceforge.net/faq/#roll_your_own

>  in which entities were converted to single characters 
>  using an %ent2char hash, where entities were mapped to the 
>  desired ISO-Lat 1 character.

If you used an XML parser module, this would be done for you.
(the 'single characters' would actually be UTF-8 encoded).
However bear in mind that the XML document would need to 
use a DTD to define the mapping.  If it didn't do that, then
it would not be a well-formed document.  Here's another link:

  http://perl-xml.sourceforge.net/faq/#undefined_entity

>  During testing, every time the program encountered an entity 
>  foreign to its knowledge, I had to look up the characer chart 
>  and add to the %ent2char associative array. I found this 
>  rather troublesome and somewhat inefficient.

People often make documents which they claim are XML but which
include references to undefined entities.  This is so common in
the RSS world that Matt Sergeant has written a program to fix
broken RSS files.  You might want to borrow code from that:

  http://axkit.org/download/rssmirror.pl

Regards
Grant


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