NumericEntities Plugin

Current Version: 0.1.2 (9/24/2009)

Introduction

XHTML defines hundreds of "named entities", like © (©), Φ (Φ) and € (€). MathML defines thousands more, like &conint (∮). Web browsers know how to handle XHTML named entities, and MathML-aware browsers know how to handle MathML named entities as well.

But a generic XML parser (as, say, might be built into your Atom Feed Reader) does not. It only knows about the five entities defined in XML 1.0: & (&), < (<) > (>) ' (') and " ("). Such a parser will barf if you try — as Atom allows — to embed XHTML content containing named entities into your feed.

The solution is to convert all your named entities into numeric character references. So, e.g., € becomes € or &conint becomes ∮. Web browsers and generic XML parsers will handle these numeric character references just fine.

This package contains an MT plugin to do the conversion for you. The plugin adds a global filter, which you can use in your templates:

<MTEntryBody numeric_entities="1">

The named entities supported by this version are described in the W3C document XML Entity definitions for Characters.

Installation

1. Download and unpack the distribution.
2. Place the contents of the plugins folder in your MT plugins folder and the contents of the extlib folder in your MT extlib folder. Be careful: these folders already have files in them. Don't overwrite them!

Standalone Perl Module

Non-MT user may be interested in the standalone Perl Module version:

use MathML::Entities;

$conv2refs = name2numbered($string); # numeric character refs
$conv2utf8 = name2utf8($string); # utf-8 characters

As with any Perl module, installation is as simple as

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Better yet, you can install it via CPAN.