Re: encoding of text files

Joerg Heinicke wrote:
> I have a problem with generated java/text files and their encoding.

Then this problem is not appropriate for xsl-list.

> It should be possible to have text files in UTF-8, shouldn't it??

Of course. Any file is just bytes. Those bytes can represent text
according to a particular encoding, or anything else.

> What can then be the problem?
> How are text files marked as UTF-8?

Ordinary text files have no way of indicating their encoding. XML document
entities and parsed general entities have encoding declarations for this
purpose, and XML parsers also accept external declarations of encoding, such
as what might be obtained from a transport protocol (HTTP response
Content-Type header, for example) by whatever is feeding the entity's bytes to
the parser.

The sender and receiver of the bytes that constitute a file intended for
processing as textual data must be in agreement on what encoding was used to
produce those bytes. How you do that in your non-XSLT related application is a
matter you should take up in a more apporpriate forum.

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________________
  mike j. brown                   |  xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
  denver/boulder, colorado, usa   |  resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/

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