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* Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
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* (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
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* Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
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* Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
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* Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
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* hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
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* the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
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* See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
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* This interface represents an entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an XML
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* document. Note that this models the entity itself not the entity
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* declaration. <code>Entity</code> declaration modeling has been left for a
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* later Level of the DOM specification.
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* <p>The <code>nodeName</code> attribute that is inherited from
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* <code>Node</code> contains the name of the entity.
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* <p>An XML processor may choose to completely expand entities before the
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* structure model is passed to the DOM; in this case there will be no
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* <code>EntityReference</code> nodes in the document tree.
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* <p>XML does not mandate that a non-validating XML processor read and
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* process entity declarations made in the external subset or declared in
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* external parameter entities. This means that parsed entities declared in
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* the external subset need not be expanded by some classes of applications,
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* and that the replacement value of the entity may not be available. When
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* the replacement value is available, the corresponding <code>Entity</code>
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* node's child list represents the structure of that replacement text.
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* Otherwise, the child list is empty.
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* <p>The DOM Level 2 does not support editing <code>Entity</code> nodes; if a
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* user wants to make changes to the contents of an <code>Entity</code>,
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* every related <code>EntityReference</code> node has to be replaced in the
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* structure model by a clone of the <code>Entity</code>'s contents, and
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* then the desired changes must be made to each of those clones instead.
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* <code>Entity</code> nodes and all their descendants are readonly.
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* <p>An <code>Entity</code> node does not have any parent.If the entity
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* contains an unbound namespace prefix, the <code>namespaceURI</code> of
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* the corresponding node in the <code>Entity</code> node subtree is
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* <code>null</code>. The same is true for <code>EntityReference</code>
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* nodes that refer to this entity, when they are created using the
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* <code>createEntityReference</code> method of the <code>Document</code>
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* interface. The DOM Level 2 does not support any mechanism to resolve
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* <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>.
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public interface Entity extends Node {
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* The public identifier associated with the entity, if specified. If the
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* public identifier was not specified, this is <code>null</code>.
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public String getPublicId();
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* The system identifier associated with the entity, if specified. If the
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* system identifier was not specified, this is <code>null</code>.
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public String getSystemId();
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* For unparsed entities, the name of the notation for the entity. For
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* parsed entities, this is <code>null</code>.
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public String getNotationName();