[Templates] error message needs improvement

23:11 on 19 May 2005

I'm using the latest stable Template Toolkit.

I'm now trying to build my structure following the examples in Chapter 
11 of the Template Toolkit book.
I'm using the xml-map to describe the menu structure.  During build, I 
get the following cryptic messages (44 times!):

 + Overview.html
 ! undef error - No semi-colon found after entity name [Ln: 71, Col: 48]

It's nice that a line and column number are printed in the message, but 
it would be even better if the name of the file where the error is would 
be printed.  Overview.html is only 13 lines long!  (I tried, 
unsuccessfully to search for parts of that error message.)

To try to track down the problem, I "found" every file in the local 
hierarchy, ran "wc -l", then sorted the list and looked at the files 
with 71 or more lines.

The ones that stood out were "bin/configure", which has a comment on 
line 71, and "src/xml/sitemap.xml".
Line 71 of that file is:
           <menu>Controlling_Tasks_&_Applications</menu>
But column 48 is the letter "o" in "Applications".
As a guess, I changed the ampersand to "_".

1. What are the sets of valid and invalid characters for the <menu> text 
in the sitemap.xml file?

 Now I get messages that say:
+ Overview.html
! undef error - Name contains invalid start character: '&#x20;'
I'm not certain that this message is saying this, but "x20" looks a lot 
like "hex for a blank character".
I checked in my xml file and in my templates/src/*.html files, and none 
of them have any fields starting with blanks.
So, I'm stuck.

2  Any idea what this last message really means?

Thanks for any help you can give,
Steve

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