Re: [xslt] xsltproc changes unicode to nonsense

[Paul Tremblay <phthenry earthlink net>]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 09:34:47AM +0100, Morus Walter wrote:
> Paul Tremblay writes:
> > In my stlesheet, I have:
> > 
> > <xsl:output method="html"/>
> > 
> > I then put this character in my xslt stylesheet:
> > 
> > &#x00A0;
> > 
> > This should be a no break space.
> > 
> > However, xsltproc translates this to a upper case A with a hat over it.
> > If I change the output method line to:
> > 
> No. It outputs a nonbreaking space in utf8 which is (in latin1) 
> a upper case A with a hat over, followed by nonbreaking space.
> The latter is a bit hard to see but it's there.
> 

Wow. I'm really confused. What does the A with the hat over it have to
do with a non-breaking space? 

I thought I could pick any unicode character, and a browser would have
to represent it. I understand that not all browsers can handle every
single unicode character, but I thought that if a browser couldn't
handle a character, it would output a "?". 

I guess I don't understand utf8. I thought that utf8 *was* unicode. That
is, it was a way to represent all of unicode with just 8-bit numbers.
(Now that I think of it, even 8-bit should be wrong, since not all
computers agree on the upper 128 in character set.) 

Do you know any good sites that explain this?


> Provide an apropriate output encoding (such as ASCII or iso-8859-1)
> to get '&#160;' or a literate non breaking space.

I'll have to try this. One thing that really annoys me is that I have a
linux box, and I always get webpages full of "??" because the webpages
assumed everone uses the same encoding scheme. I thought utf8 was a way
to ensure this wouldn't happen. But I guess I have a thing or two to
learn!

Paul

-- 

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*Paul Tremblay         *
*phthenry@earthlink.net*
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