Re: [xml] How to determine document encoding

[BJ Chippindale <bchippindale networkadvantage biz>]

Doesn't this limit the efficacy and universality of XML?   You can't 
count on
the sender actually putting the encoding where it belongs, or even 
including one
at all.

So it is not possible to have a "generic" reader that accepts any of UTF-8,
UTF-16 or any other common encodings?   I actually had the temerity to 
code up a
fragment that attempts to read in characters  and use 
xmlDetectCharEncoding in a
temporary buffer.  

It's crude, but for my limited purpose it worked.  Appending it on the 
start of
my  reader is clear-to-the-bone ugly,  but it did work.

When you say "Drop the encoding in the first line" do you mean the 
sender has to
do this?

respectfully
BJ

Daniel Veillard wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 02:17:17PM +0100, Erik F. Andersen wrote:
>  
>
> > I have a SOAP document that contains another SOAP document
> > as a node value. When I extract the embedded SOAP document
> > (xmlnode->children->contents) this will always be in UTF-8 because that's
> > how xmllib encodes contents internally.
> >    
>
>  All strings returned from the API will be in UTF-8, yes definitely.
>
>  
>
> > My problem is now how to decode the contents so that I can load it
> > via xmlParseDoc?
> >    
>
>  Use xmlReadxxx APIs and provide the encoding. In general use the new
> APIs based on xmlReadxxx instead of the xmlParsexxx ones.
>
>  
>
> > In other words, how can I read the encoding attribute in <?xml...>
> > prior to actually loading the document?
> >    
>
>  You should not do this, this is a very flawed design.
>
>  
>
> > I tried loading the UTF-8 encoded document and this can lead to some
> > strange results because the document is actually ISO-8859-1 encoded
> > in the first place. Of course I can just decode the document by calling
> > UTF8Toisolat1 directly but this is not a very generic solution to my
> > problem...
> >    
>
>  Drop the encoding in the first line it will be UTF-8 in the string you 
> read from the libxml2 API.
>
> Daniel
>
>