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Re: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16

• To: xml-dev@b...
• Subject: Re: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
• From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>
• Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 15:14:03 +0100
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <NBBBIBMKFOFCNEBAKDPLCEKIKDAA.xml-dev@b...>
• References: <NBBBIBMKFOFCNEBAKDPLCEKIKDAA.xml-dev@b...>

> or is there ever a good reason to specify
> which to use other than for document size reasons?

If all your tools are real XML tools then clearly no, because as you say
both must be supported. But if you suspect that at some point someone
might be tempted to edit using a "legacy" text editor or grep or sed or
some such, then utf-8 has the advantages that it is designed to have:
the character stream appears to such a tool to be "safe" 8bit input. The
characters themselves will of course be mis-interpreted, but if you are
making structural re-arrangements, you can process (on a good day:-)
such a file without breaking the utf-8 encoding and the result can then
be read by a real XML system that understands that. Conversely utf-16
tends to look to such 8-bit apps as if every other byte is 0 (If the
text is English, and even if not, all XML syntax characters are in the
ascii range, so you always get a lot of byte 0). So basically a utf-16
file implies that you are more committed to unicode-aware
applications. Whether or not that is a good thing depends on politics as
much as anything:-)

David

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• References:
  • Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
    • From: "Paul Spencer" <xml-dev@b...>

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