Re: [xml] Scripting languages and character encodings

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 10:13:48AM +1100, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> Hi Stevem
> > 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.

  Actually it's more complex than that check appendix F of the spec
    http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-guessing
the document encoding declaration (it's not an attribute) may be provided
by the context (like an HTTP header) and override the value possibly
found in the XML declaration.

> 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

  Hum, except for those contextual informations... I consider this a really
bad practice, but I have tried to adapt the APIs for this. For example
the new xmlReadxxx and xmlCtxtReadxxx APIs allow to take an argument
  const char *encoding,
which may override the XML Decl encoding.
  Now the problem is that I suspect this may not work well with UTF-8
for implementation reasons but it is worth a try.

Daniel

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