[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: An XML document is not well-formed if encoding="..."does n

• From: Michael Sokolov <sokolov@ifactory.com>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:28:39 -0500

Your experiment illustrate's David Lee's point regarding the difficulty 
of this whole problem.  We can't really tell what's going on without 
access to your entire toolchain.  (It's unlikely that the encoding of 
the characters in this email is byte-identical with the files you 
created.) It's possible that your editor changed the character encoding 
of your text when you changed the XML declaration (emacs does this)!

It's also possible (I haven't checked) that the bytes in your text are 
valid UTF-8 *and* valid ISO-8859-1, althought they would represent 
different characters in the two systems.

-Mike

On 12/28/2012 3:37 PM, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Thanks Chris for pointing us to that article: XML on the Web has Failed
>
> I am making my way through it.
>
> This statement in the article piqued my interest:
>
>      ... determining the actual character encoding of an
>      XML document is a prerequisite for determining its
>      well-formedness ...
>
> I decided to do an experiment.
>
> I created this XML document and encoded each character in the document using the iso-8859-1 encoding and in the encoding="..." I asserted that I am using the iso-8859-1 encoding:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
> <Name>López</Name>
>
> I checked the document for well-formedness and the XML parser said it is well-formed.
>
> Good.
>
> Then I changed encoding="iso-8859-1" to encoding="utf-8":
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
> <Name>López</Name>
>
> I checked it for well-formedness and the parser said it is still well-formed.
>
> Huh?
>
> Shouldn't I have gotten a well-formedness error?
>
> I did my experiment using the latest version of Oxygen XML. I think that it uses the Xerces XML Parser, right?
>
> Is this a bug in Xerces?
>

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: An XML document is not well-formed if encoding="..."does not match the actual encoding of the characters in the document, right?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>

• References:
  • An XML document is not well-formed if encoding="..." does not matchthe actual encoding of the characters in the document, right?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>