DOM loadXML not loading doctype as expected in PHP5

Hi I'm working on a project using PHP5 and I'm using the DOM extension quite heavily. I need to be able to store various character entities such as $nbsp; and &eacute; Note: this is for a custom XML document, not standard (X)HTML. When I load my XML string into my domDocument I've been trying variations of $doctype1 and $doctype2 below. Here is my code: $doctype1 = <<<EODT <!DOCTYPE page [ <!ENTITY % ISOlat1 PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Latin1 for XHTML//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-lat1.ent"> %ISOlat1; <!ENTITY % ISOsymbol PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Symbols for XHTML//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-symbol.ent"> %ISOsymbol; <!ENTITY % ISOspecial PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Special for XHTML//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-special.ent"> %ISOspecial; ]> EODT; $doctype2 = '<!DOCTYPE page PUBLIC "-" "http://gv.ca/dtd/character-entities.dtd">'; $xml = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>'.$doctype1. '<page>&nbsp;</page>'; $dom = new domDocument(); $dom->loadXML($xml); echo $dom->saveXML(); The above code works as-is and the &nbsp; is present in the huge output. However, when I change it to use $doctype2 the &nbsp; is no longer there and returns the warning "Entity 'nbsp' not defined in Entity, line 1". Of course the $doctype2 string is the one I need. What am I doing wrong? Why isn't it loading the external entities? Is there some other way of doing this that I somehow missed? I tested the exact same xml code using "xmllint -format -loaddtd file.xml" and it worked fine. Tested on Gentoo with PHP 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 with libxml 2.6.11. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks, -- David Numan <dave@guidedvision.com>