[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: [ Revised ] 15 elementary truths about XML
> Are you saying that an XML processors builds on top of another piece of software (which converts bytes to characters)? I'm pretty sure sure the xml parser will parse a character stream which it gets from either the layer below (offloading the conversion to the host language) or the layer above (getting a string from the application). (if I'm wrong we'll soon find out :) For example, in Java land the parse() method of the XMLReader takes an 'InputSource' which can be either a byte stream or a character stream. You need to use a character stream if the lexical xml you want to parse is either a) already in character form or b) you need to convert the byte stream yourself using some external encoding information (xml over http). Either way, the application above provides the xml parser with a character stream, not bytes. If you provide the xml parser with a byte stream (or a system id (a file path)) then xml parser will determine the encoding itself and then pass the byte stream and the encoding to the host language method to get the characters. It is a bit of grey area here, because to determine the correct encoding to use it would need to parse the few bytes itself as ascii looking for the prolog, but as far as I know, that's the only time it will do that. Aren't parsers all token based anyway? Nothing works at the byte level. (again, hoping to be corrected or confirmed there) > Perhaps I should use the word "file" rather than "document"? For example: The contents of an XML file is a sequence of zeros and ones called bits. I would say 'xml is a tree of nodes' rather than 'xml is a sequence of bytes'. -- Andrew Welch http://andrewjwelch.com
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