Re: How to read the encoding of an XML document

At 12:59 25-10-2001, James Garriss wrote:

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?"

So it seems to me that I should be safe outputing my data to UTF-16. That make sense?

Yes. UTF-8 and UTF-16 both cover the entire Unicode repertoire. The difference is that that UTF-8 uses a different number of bytes for different characters, while UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for most characters. For European content, UTF-8 is usually a win; for Asian content, UTF-16 is generally better. But either can represent the entire Unicode repertoire.