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On 10 December 2010 09:28, David Carlisle <davidc@n...> wrote: > On 10/12/2010 08:56, Stephen Green wrote: >> >> Does newXML being treatable as a string mean the *UTF-8 default* >> requirement >> is better relaxed in some way? I mean, a developer writing a string >> doesn't want >> to have to ensure it is all written in UTF-8 do they? > > why would any person ever have to know what the utf8 encoding is? If you > want an "a" then you can enter an a without knowing what the latin1 or ascii > or utf8 encodings of an a are. They happen to all be the same in that case. > If you pick another letter such as pound sign, or e acute they happen to be > different, but since typically a human doesn't know any of the numbers it > doesn't make any difference, it's just a matter of what your text editor > does when you hit save. Yep - the "UTF-8/16 only" suggestion is to solve the problem of the potential mismatch between the encoding in the prolog and the actual encoding.. add to that the content-type when http is involved and you have 3 areas to look at to determine the encoding... This manifests itself as the common problem of "funny characters" in the output, where UTF-8 has been parsed as windows 1252 or latin 1. Or vice-versa where you get the "invalid byte sequence" error message. One common cause of this is simply someone editing the xml file in a text editor such as notepad... someone updates a value in a config file and bang, the xml won't parse any more. Making it UTF-8/16 only fixes the widespread "funny characters" problem by always parsing in UTF-8/16, and on the flip side can replace the obscure "Invalid byte sequence.." error message with "This document is not UTF-8/16, please fix this by blah blah blah" or some other more helpful message. It also fixes the 3-way xml-over-http whats-the-encoding fun... It also makes removing the prolog easier, and should allow a better error message when parsing an empty file etc. -- Andrew Welch http://andrewjwelch.com
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