2b) - i could write a litte parser (potentially much faster) Since XML entity references can be described with a regular language, there is an equivalent deter

2b) - i could write a litte parser (potentially much faster) Since XML entity references can be described with a regular language, there is an equivalent deterministic finite state acceptor. So, any parser you will write, will probably be slower. Anyway, I think that the interviewer referred to named entity recognition.