Re: How to read the encoding of an XML document

[James Garriss]

> At 08:30 PM 10/25/2001 +0100, David Carlisle wrote:
>  >> If I no longer know what my original XML document was encoded as, how
do I
> > > know the appropriate encoding set to specify for the output?
> >
> >every xml application is mandated to support at least the utf8 and utf16
> >encodings, so either of those is always appropriate  (or at least
> >acceptable) whatever the original encoding of the file.
>
> Ok.  If you recall, I started this discussion by mentioning that I am
> receiving XML documents from several European countries.  So the pertinent
> question for me is "if UTF-8 and/or UTF-16 will be the output encoding set
> I must use, will they handle charcters from the languages I care about?"
>
> I found this statement on unicode.org:
>
> "What Characters Does the Unicode Standard Include?  The Unicode Standard
> defines codes for characters used in the major languages written today.
> Scripts include the European alphabetic scripts, Middle Eastern
> right-to-left scripts, and scripts of Asia."
>
> So it seems to me that I should be safe outputing my data to UTF-16.  That
> make sense?
>

Yes.  At least, any xml processor would be able to handle either utf-8 or
utf-16.  What may be displayed by a browser or word processor, though (if
you transform it into a displayable document), is another question.  utf-8
might be a better choice depending on what is going to consume it.

Cheers,

Tom P


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