how to reference the path to a DTD value in XML

Question

I am a newbie when it comes to XML and DTD values, so forgive me if this is a simple question or if I am going about this in the wrong way. Can you specify a DTD value in the same way you can specify a path to a property in XML?

For instance, if you have the XML file below:

<!DOCTYPE ... SYSTEM "<path_to_file>">
<BOOK>
    <AUTHOR>
        <FIRST>John</FIRST>
        <LAST>Quncy</LAST>
    </AUTHOR>
    <NAME>blah</NAME>
    <DATE>12/23/13</DATE>
</BOOK>

You could specify the first name of the author by the path:

/BOOK/AUTHOR/FIRST

Is there any syntax to specify a DTD entity like the DOCTYPE in the same way?

Ultimately what I would like to do is use an in house XML parser already written in java to find a DTD entry that I specify and delete it from the XML file. For instance, with the above XML, I would like to specify DOCTYPE and have it removed from the XML. There is already code in place that, given a path, will delete that section from the XML file. I would like to leverage that to also delete DTD entries as well, but I have no idea how to reference it.

Answer 1

No. DOCTYPE is a parsing and validation directive. That is: DOCTYPE and DTD affect parsing and validation but are not a part of the document as separate entities after that. The XML data model does not containDOCTYPE or DTD definitions and they practically don't exist after the document has been parsed.