[xml] Newbie question: how strict should usage of xmlChar be?

["Kevin P. Fleming" <kpfleming backtobasicsmgmt com>]

I've got an app that uses libxml2; I didn't write it, but I'm 
maintaining it. I'm wondering, since the app contains a variety of 
direct casts to and from xmlChar, how strict should this be?

I see that the library contains xmlCharStrdup for converting a char * to 
xmlChar *, but I also see from the header files that xmlChar is just an 
"unsigned char" anyway, so converting from char * to xmlChar * is a safe 
cast. Are there environments where this is not the case, or is it 
planned that libxml2 may use something other than "unsigned char" for 
xmlChar in the future?

I guess my concern is if doing these direct casts will impact libxml2's 
abiliity to handle XML streams that have been encoded using something 
other than ISO-8859-1. I have a lot of places where I need to supply 
element/attribute names to libxml2 calls, and if I have to 
xmlCharStrdup/xmlFree each one of them I can do that, but I want to make 
sure I'm not wasting my time and energy :-)