Re: [xml] Scripting languages and character encodings

[Steve Ball <Steve Ball zveno com>]

Damn!  A thread on this issue only a week ago... and I missed it!
Sorry folks for wasting bandwidth :-(

I did have a preference to not edit the document data, but also to
treat it as text rather than as a binary.  Looks like I will need to
think through the issues some more.

Cheers, and many thanks for the pointer,
Steve Ball

On 22/01/2004, at 10:13, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-01-22 at 08:15, Steve Ball wrote:
> > My question is, can I tell the libxml2 parser that a document
> > has a certain character encoding, overriding what the XML
> > declaration says?
>
> The short answer is "no". If you are changing the encoding of the data
> in the document, then you need to change the encoding in the XML
> declaration as well.
>
> This shouldn't be a particularly onerous pre-parsing step, since it is
> one attribute in the first line of the file.
>
> The issue of overriding the encoding declaration has been discussed on
> the list a few times previously and Daniel's position has always been
> that passing in data that is not well-formed XML is not something that
> libxml is going to handle (the XML specification requires as much). The
> most recent thread on this is titled "Control over encoding declaration
> (prolog and meta)" that started on 14 Jan 2004 (check the online
> archives). Obviously you don't want to do the re-encoding idea 
> mentioned
> in that thread, since then you go from ISO-8859-1 -> UTF-8 -> 
> ISO-8859-1
> -> libxml which is less than efficient, but the justifications may be 
> of
> interest to you.



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