Re: [xml] strange encoding behavior when parsing HTML files

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 01:51:10PM -0700, Aaron Patterson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There seems to be strange behavior in libxml2 with regard to encoding
> when parsing an HTML file.  If an HTML file contains a meta tag
> hinting at the encoding, libxml2 will use the encoding in the meta tag
> *unless* there are strange characters before the meta tag.
>
> If there are strange characters before the meta tag, libxml2 will
> guess the encoding and use the guessed encoding for the rest of the
> document even though the meta tag reported the correct encoding.
> What's worse is that libxml2 will report that it used the encoding
> from the meta tag when outputting the content of the document
> indicates that it did not.
>
> Here is an example of the behavior in action:
>
>   http://gist.github.com/96641
>
> fail.html fails, and success.html "does the right thing".
>
> Should I report this in bugzilla?

  Yes please. The encoding handling is a real problem in HTML
because you can get content and hence have to parse before possibly
getting the meta tag (if available !)
  That was fixed in XML by the xmlDecl and rules to parse it without
encoding informations a priori.

Daniel

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