Re: [xml-dev] Quiz: How do you put a Euro sign in your data if yourXML u

[Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>]

On 1 March 2013 06:30, David Lee <dlee@calldei.com> wrote:
> Curious .. Is this a common misconception ?

Encoding issues are very common...

> It is very frustrating as it seems so obvious to me yet a large number of people I work with over the years are confused ... And worse don't recognize their ignorance so don't look in the right places when things break.   Since this seems so common to me I hesitate to discount this confusion as simple intellectual inability ... Maybe something can be done to educate engineers better on this concept ....  It is as fundamental as binary arithmetic but seems to me to be vastly misunderstood beyond proportion  to the complexity.
>

I think you are being unreasonable there David, it is genuinely
confusing.  Did you know about IE helpfully silently switching to
Windows-1252 even if the document states ISO-8859-1 when it finds a
control character?   Do you know about XML over http and all the
potential encoding issues there?  Do you know about the 'platform
default encoding' for byte to character conversions in java?  (ok you
probably do, but you get my point)

The fact that numeric character refs refer to unicode codepoints is
pretty xml specialist knowledge, as is how the parser determines the
encoding to use.


-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com