Hi, I'm REXML newbie :-), and I have a comment. Sean Russell <ser / germane-software.com> wrote: > 1) REXML hasn't been handling entities in parsed documents very well. This > has been fixed, but I'm wondering if REXML's behavior is confusing. REXML > inherited Electric XML's behavior of converting &, <, and > to entities on > write. This is convenient, but it may be confusing for users to know when > they have to quote their own entities, and when to leave them alone. 1.1a3 > fixes this to a certain extent; REXML ignores entities in text, but it > still converts &, <, and >. It also reverse-converts &, <, and > > back to characters on a read. &#xxx; entities are now correctly handled. > I'm accepting opinions about this matter. I'd like entity handling to be > fairly painless, but I don't want ambiguous behavior if I can avoid it. In XML 1.0 Rec., there are 5 predefined general entities: "&", "<", ">", "'" and '"'. (cf. 4.6 Predefined Entity http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-predefined-ent ) Should REXML convert "'" and '"' into ' and "? At least, the behavior: foo_str = "" foo = REXML::Element.new("foo") foo.attributes["bar"] = "aaa'bbb\"ccc" foo.write(foo_str) p foo_str #=> "<foo bar='aaa'bbb\"ccc'/>" is odd. Regards, TAKAHASHI Masayoshi (maki / inac.co.jp)