[ xmlunit-Feature Requests-1877458 ] Support for XML entities comparison

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Feature Requests item #1877458, was opened at 2008-01-22 16:50
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by bodewig
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Category: XMLUnit for Java
Group: None
>Status: Pending
>Resolution: Fixed
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Olivier Armand (extended)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Support for XML entities comparison

Initial Comment:
The DifferenceEngine's JavaDoc ( http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/api/org/custommonkey/xmlunit/DifferenceEngine.html ) indicates: "Nodes of other types (eg ENTITY_NODE) will be skipped."

This means that for example this test case fails: 

assertXMLEqual("<root>bla\r\nbla</root>", "<root>bla&#xD;\nbla</root>");

I suppose this is because XmlUnit sees \r\n on one side and only \n on the other side since &#xD; is skipped.

In my case the control and the test are generated by different processing chain (and XML parsers/serializers), which may produce either entities or standard characters.

XMLUnit.setNormalizeWhitespace(true); seems to be a solution for the special case of this entity, but 
true support for XML entities comparison would be much better.

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>Comment By: Stefan Bodewig (bodewig)
Date: 2008-04-04 17:47

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my fault, the &quot; case passes even without the
setExpandEntityReferences flag and the &#xD; case fails even with the flag.
 My best guess is that &#xD; simply doesn't expand to the same thing as
\r.

assertXMLEqual("<root>bla&#13;\nbla</root>",
"<root>bla&#xD;\nbla</root>")

passes as well, with and without explicit entity reference expansion.

Anyway, I've added the flag now.  I'd be grateful if you could test
XMLUnit's svn trunk, set the flag and see whether it resolves the issues
you see (apart from the \r case).

http://xmlunit.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xmlunit?view=rev&revision=261

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Comment By: Stefan Bodewig (bodewig)
Date: 2008-04-04 17:29

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If I change your example to 

assertXMLEqual("<root>bla1\nbla</root>", "<root>bla&#x31;\nbla</root>");

it passes for me, so there is something strange with the expansion of a
carriage return.

My reading of EntityReference's Javadocs

"Note that character references and references to predefined entities are
considered to be expanded by the HTML or XML processor so that characters
are represented by their Unicode equivalent rather than by an entity
reference."

is that we can rely on the parser to expand simple character references
and my test with "1" -> "&#x31; seems to confirm this.

If I use &quot; and \" it fails, again.

I'll throw in a property for XMLUnit that invokes
DocumentBuilderFactory.setExpandEntityReferences for more control, we'll
see how that works out.

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