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Re: Quiz: How do you put a Euro sign in your data if yourXML u

• From: David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>
• To: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
• Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2013 17:39:06 +0000

> On 1 March 2013 06:30, David Lee <dlee@calldei.com> wrote:
>> Curious .. Is this a common misconception ?
> 
> Encoding issues are very common...

Here I was referring specifically to the fact that numeric entities are unicode codepoints  not input encoded bytes.   In this case I honestly never conceived of this being confused.  
Clearly I am wrong.

> I think you are being unreasonable there David, it is genuinely
> confusing.  

I agree completely ... Encoding is horrendously confusing.
What concerns me most is that in this area in particular I suggest there seems to be
a huge blind spot in many engineers around how much they believe they understand,
Where in other areas most engineers I know are fairly realistic about what the know and what they do not.    There is something unique IMHO about the whole concept of encoding that seems to hide its intrinsic complexity to even very intelligent people.   Like a magic invisible meme that is vastly prevalent yet cloaks its very existence until it bites you.

But my comment was primarily about XML numeric entities which I presumed 
was entirely obvious ...  Clearly my idea of what is obvious is deeply flawed.



> 
> The fact that numeric character refs refer to unicode codepoints is
> pretty xml specialist knowledge, as is how the parser determines the
> encoding to use.

I suggest these issues are vastly different.

• References:
  • Re: Quiz: How do you put a Euro sign in your data if yourXML uses windows-1252 encoding and you use a numeric character reference?
    • From: David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>
  • Re: Quiz: How do you put a Euro sign in your data if yourXML uses windows-1252 encoding and you use a numeric character reference?
    • From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>