4. (iirc) You can implement your own EntityResolver() in java, and then set the parser to look there to resolve entities. This gives you control of what gets passed back, so I think you can just pass back the entity reference. I'm not too sure how you would get on further down the chain - I used this a while back to parse lots of xml that refencened dtd's that were unreachable (can't remember why offhand...) but its nice because it's all done with java (no nasty separate text processing stuff :)

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/api/org/xml/sax/EntityResolver.html

Cheers,
Wendell

======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================