xml-dev - rec.xml

[David Megginson <ak117@freenet.carleton.ca>]

Peter Murray-Rust writes:

 > Using SAX (alone) to parse the XML version of the XML
 > recommendation (rec.xml), is it possible to create a well-formed
 > version? The first time I tried this the result surprised me.

James Clark has created the Java application XMLTest to do exactly
this:

  http://www.jclark.com/xml/XMLTest.java

I just normalised the REC with the following command line:

  java XMLTest com.microstar.sax.AElfredDriver /tmp
  REC-xml-19980210.xml

It seems to have come out fine (though without XML declaration,
comments, DOCTYPE, etc.).  The purpose of James's application is to
allow easy comparisons of different SAX drivers and parsers.

 > BTW there may be problems parsing rec.xml as the official version
 > contains a (single) character #160 ( ).

The problem has been fixed in the REC.

Parsing the REC no longer causes problems for AElfred because the
REC's XML declaration declares the encoding as "ISO-8859-1", where
#160 is a legal character.  The problem is that not all XML parsers
allow the declared encoding ISO-8859-1 (though that's what most of
them really support).

 > This has actually been 'commented out' but parsers such as AElfred
 > don't accept it and throw an error. DavidM assures me that this is
 > the correct thing to do - I take this on trust.

This is _a_ correct thing to do.  This is an error but not a fatal
error, so it is up to the parser whether or not to report it.  That
said, any parser with actual UTF-8 support will somehow choke on #160
if it thinks it's parsing UTF-8.  Right now, most parsers claim to be
parsing UTF-8 when they're really parsing ISO-8859-1, hence they don't
choke on #160.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117@freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins@microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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