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

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

William M. Brack wrote:

> First, take a look at http://xmlsoft.org/encoding.html where this
> should be explained (that's a polite way of saying RTFM :-).  The

Now I feel bad... I had read most of the "Developer Menu", but neglected 
that one because I wasn't concerned about it. Now I see that was exactly 
what I should have read :-)

> basic idea is that, internally within the library, all the "char"
> data is kept as UTF8, and xmlChar* is a pointer to a UTF8 string. 
> When an input document is parsed, the library makes use of the
> encoding declaration (or some guesswork) to do any conversion
> required from the document's encoding into UTF8, and the reverse is
> true on output.  However, if the user uses the library API's to put
> data into the tree (e.g. creates a node with a "name" attribute) it
> is up to the user to assure any necessary encoding is performed
> before the API is called.  Similarly, if he uses the API's to fetch
> data, he must be prepared to process UTF8 (if the input document
> might contain characters which needed to be encoded).

OK, so since my app uses only tag/attribute names that consist entirely 
of the ASCII-compatible portion of UTF-8, then I do not need to 
xmlCharStrdup my hardcoded strings within the app before sending them 
into the library API calls. The converse is also true, when I ask the 
API what the name of an element is, I only need to check for the ones 
I'm expecting; if a user supplies me an XML document with a non-ASCII 
(but valid UTF-8) tag in it, it will be treated no differently than an 
ASCII-compatible UTF-8 tag that I don't understand (meaning it would 
have failed DTD validation had they used the DTD).

Thanks for the help, I can now proceed with cleaning up some code with a 
better understanding of what it's supposed to doing.