How do I get libxml2's SAX2 interface to let me see < et al?

Question

I have some code using libxml2's SAX2 interface. I want to be able to see < type entities as entity references and not as characters but it appears that no matter what I do, libxml2 will turn < into a < and then hand it to my characters callback instead of calling my reference callback.

Any ideas as to how I can force libxml2 to call my reference callback for the basic predefined entities?

Answer 1

You can't do this. LibXML is returning the string contents of the node, which is a literal <. If you want your string to contain < then your original XML needs to contain <.

If you want to further escape this (which you should only do on output to another XML document), try calling a module like HTML::Entities to do the work.