Re: [xml] HTML-parser: encoding?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 08:51:09PM +0100, Elizabeth Mattijsen wrote:
> At 07:01 PM 11/29/01 +0100, Melvyn Sopacua wrote:
> > At 15:52 11/29/2001 +0100, you wrote:
> > > I would propose that _if_ the HTML-parser is used _and_ there is _no_ 
> > > encoding  specification found, that libxml _then_ would check all of the 
> > > text in the tree for characters illegal for the ISO-Latin-1 encoding and 
> > > replace these with spaces (so that the size of the buffer used is not changed).
> > Personally, I think that would be quite expensive...
>
> Expensive in what way?  I always thought that libxml was made for complete 
> functionality, not speed.  And it would only happen _if_ you are using the 
> HTML-parser _and_ no encoding information was found.

  Actually all characters are already been tested

> Or maybe xmllint could need an extra parameter to transform any characters 
> not legal in the encoding of the document, to be replaced by another 
> character.  That would make it more general...

  I don't like the idea to replace the character with something else.
Either there one detect a problem and raise an error, possibly removing
information, but the idea of silently changing the content is not something
I support. This kind of kludges becodes a real pain once such a behaviour
is burried inside a large software and one start wondering why the output
is not the one expected by the input.
  The best way in the case of the default fallback to ISO-Latin-1 is to
reencode the characters as character references and let the downstream
deal with them.

> I don't agree with the pre-processing, but _can_ agree with the iconv 
> post-processing.  Would be nice if it would be part of xmllint, though...

  What are the range in 00-FF which are not part of ISO 8859-1,
is that just [80-A0[ ?

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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