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Re: control characters

• From: Matt Sergeant <matt@s...>
• To: Mark Volkmann <volkmann@i...>
• Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2000 21:04:46 +0100 (BST)

On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Mark Volkmann wrote:

> I've never seen a discussion of the reason why most ASCII control
> characters, such as a form feed, are not allowed in XML documents. Can
> anyone tell me the reason behind that decision or point me to a spec. that
> explains that?

Two possible reasons:

1. They are unnecesary in XML - why have invisible codes when you can
substitute <formfeed/> or <bell/>.

2. They can be useful in streamed XML as a record separator - e.g.:

<message>
	...
</message>
^L
<message>
	...
</message>
^L
etc.

This sort of stream is dead easy to process with Perl's XML::Parser, for
example, where you can just set the "StreamDelimiter" variable to ^L and
the parser does the right thing.

-- 
<Matt/>

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org


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