>> Also, the fact that the first few characters depend on the application
>> will make it hard to write general transcoders.
>I had thought that too, but on thinking about it more I cannot see any
>additional complexity compared with the XML Appendix F. The details
>of the algorithm are different but still it is the same three steps
[...]
> * else look for EBCDIC/ASCII signature (use string "[^a-zA-Z01-9]{1-4}xtext\b"
> rather than "<?xml\b"
For XML, it's only necessary to look at the first four bytes to cover
Unicode encodings, ascii supersets and ebcdic. In the xtext case, you
will have to compare a string at several different positions or apply
a regular expression. Certainly doable, but certainly more complex too!
-- Richard
