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I want to use the em dash in a value attribute for an h:link component.
Here is my attempt (currently not working):
<h:link value="#{somethingHere} — #{anotherHere}">
<f:param name="identifier" value="#{somethingHere.identifier}" />
</h:link>
This results in a FaceletsException:
FaceletException: Error Parsing /index.xhtml: Error Traced[line: 13]
The entity "mdash" was referenced, but not declared.
at com.sun.faces.facelets.compiler.SAXCompiler.doCompile(SAXCompiler.java:394)
...
I know I can use an HTML anchor instead, but is there a way to do it inside an Expression Language (EL) expression? What is the correct way to do this?
359
Facelets is XML based and processed by a XML parser. The — is a HTML entity and not recognized in XML. Only the five listed in this Wikipedia page, ", &, ', < and >, are recognized in XML.
Facelets/XML uses by default already UTF-8, and HTML entities are basically a leftover of pre-UTF-8 era and not necessary in UTF-8 documents, so you could just put the actual character plain/unencoded in the template (provided that the editor is able to save the file as UTF-8).
In other words, simply adjust
<h:link value="#{somethingHere} — #{anotherHere}">
to
<h:link value="#{somethingHere} — #{anotherHere}">
If this isn't an option for some reason, then you could instead use a numeric character reference in the format &#nnnn;, like as one would use   to represent a in XML. You can find the numeric character reference in fileformat.info: Unicode Character 'EM DASH' (U+2014)
Encodings
HTML Entity (decimal)
—
So, this should do for you:
<h:link value="#{somethingHere} — #{anotherHere}">
An alternative, which should satisfy the exact error message more, is to declare the entity reference explicitly yourself in the doctype.
<!DOCTYPE html [
<!ENTITY mdash "—">
]>
But this isn't the general recommendation/approach as you'd need to repeat this over every single XML file wherein the character is been used.
171
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