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Asked: 2026-06-10T00:13:50+00:00

I want to use the em dash in a value attribute for an h:link

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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} &mdash; #{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?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Facelets is XML based and processed by a XML parser. The &mdash; is a HTML entity and not recognized in XML. Only the five listed in this Wikipedia page, &quot;, &amp;, &apos;, &lt; and &gt;, 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} &mdash; #{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 &#160; to represent a &nbsp; in XML. You can find the numeric character reference in fileformat.info: Unicode Character ‘EM DASH’ (U+2014)

    Encodings

    HTML Entity (decimal) &#8212;

    So, this should do for you:

    <h:link value="#{somethingHere} &#8212; #{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 "&#8212;"> 
]>

    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.

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