# Spec Issues: (Character) Entity References **URL:** \ **Category:** Spec\ **Created:** [November 29, 2016, 12:08pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/spec-issues-character-entity-references/2306 "2016-11-29T12:08:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 12
**Author:** ![tin-pot](https://cdn.commonmark.org/user_avatar/talk.commonmark.org/tin-pot/32/810_2.png) [@tin-pot](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/tin-pot)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2016, 10:16pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/spec-issues-character-entity-references/2306/12 "2016-11-30T22:16:01Z")
I forgot in the above to point out one more good reason why a _CommonMark_ (or _Markdown_) processor should **not** be required to undiscriminatingly replace all _character entity references_ and not even all _numeric character references_, and this has nothing to do with encodings, fonts, or “exotic” Unicode characters: When a _CommonMark_ author writes, for example, `|` or `|` instead of `|` for the U+007C VERTICAL LINE in some text, he probably has a reason for making this distinction: Very likely, the literal `|` character will have some significance in a post-processing tool (maybe to separate columns of some sort), which the `|` will not entail. (Note that is the very same distinction between `[` and `\[` in _CommonMark_.) And it seems quite unhelpful to **mandate** that a _CommonMark_ processor, when generating some sort of XML/HTML/SGML/DocBook etc. output, should obliterate this distinction, hereby making such post-processing much harder if not impossible. So a simple recommendation would be that at least _entity references_ and _character references_ to ASCII characters **should** be preserved and reproduced in the processor’s output (at the user’s option, maybe?). --- _[View the full topic](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/spec-issues-character-entity-references/2306)._