RE: [xml] encoding tutorial draft

["Labib Iskander, Marcus" <ml cm4all com>]

Hi Igor,

alright, alright. Let's stress the necessity of conversion. But I still
believe that the majority of readers of the tutorial, will only need the
hint and know what this is all about. I would rather point people not
familar with the idea of encoding to some different source of information
and help the rest to a fast start using libxml. However, since I am not
going to write the tutorial (nobody would like it anyway :), everything is
fine with me!!
Maybe I am too biased, though. I just started programming C but am quite
familar with Java, XML, MIME, ...
I quickly scanned through the tutorials before my first try on libxml and
loved it being so short :)
But thats just my personal perception ;) I am also very pleased with reading
libxmls source because I am learning this way.

Cheers,
  Marcus

PS: Am I mistaken that every introductory text on XML contains a chapter
about encoding?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Igor Zlatkovic [mailto:igor stud fh-frankfurt de]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 4:27 PM
> To: xml gnome org
> Subject: Re: [xml] encoding tutorial draft
>
>
> > I am not sure Igor if you do not expect too few. Of course there are
> > programmer who never put a thought on the general problem of data
> > representation in computing, but from time to time every 
> programmer is faced
> > with the problem, that (s)he needs to know about the actual 
> representation
> > of data. (This does not relate only to character data but 
> to numbers and of
> > course the more complex data types). Not knowing what 
> "encoding" is produces
> > so many traps. I think you can expect, that most of the 
> libxml users DO know
> > what encoding is and that there are many different ways of 
> representing
> > character data, since everybody has once walked into one of 
> these traps or
> > the other. 
>
> Sure, you are right. Still, the fact remains, that people 
> have problems 
> believing that the conversion is necessary. Statements like 
> "I have found a 
> bug, libxml misinterprets my strings when they contain äöü" 
> are too common.
>
> I wasn't trying to introduce any reader in C, but to 
> emphasise the necessity 
> of conversion as much as possible.
>
>  > And don't forget the people we are talking about are C
>  > programmers! I emphasize again: C!! Only that they need a 
> small reminder
>  > perhaps.
>
> C programmers are the targeted audience and every C programmer was a 
> beginner once upon a time. Many posts here could be observed 
> which hint that 
> the poster knows little beyond the first hello-world lesson. 
> But, these 
> beginners in C are also our audience. What better way to 
> learn programming 
> than to write software? Libxml is not reserved just for the 
> expirienced.
>
> > More grateful they will be if supplied with a simple way of 
> achieving the
> > conversion to utf-8. Maybe the smaller code snippet I made 
> for the FAQ
> > should at least be mentioned in the tutorial, since 80% of 
> all appliances of
> > conversion will be from iso latin-1 (or some local windows 
> codepage almost
> > the same) and about 10% the other way round (just a guess 
> and not counting
> > east asian programmers who know the business of encoding 
> quite well :-):
> > in = "some null terminated iso latin-1 string";
> > temp = size = (int)strlen(in)+1; /*terminating null included*/
> > out_size = size*2-1; /*terminating null is just one byte*/
> > out = malloc((size_t)out_size); 
> > if (!out) {
> >     if ((ret=isolat1ToUTF8(out, &out_size, in, &temp)) || 
> temp-size) {
> >             free(out);
> >             out=NULL;
> >     }
> > }
>
> Sure, everything that makes sense to someone is worth 
> mentioning. Each human 
> perceives the information differently and only the readers of 
> a tutorial can 
> judge if it helped them learn something or not.
>
> The fact remains, that libxml is there to process XML, not to 
> transcode data 
> from one format into another.
>
> Ciao
> Igor
>
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