Re: [xml-dev] Is it a well-formedness error to use a character not in the encoding specified by the XML declaration?

"Costello, Roger L." <[email protected]> wrote on 03/18/2010 02:13:00 PM:

> Hi Folks,
>
> Consider this simple XML document. The XML declaration specifies an
> encoding of US-ASCII. The document contains an œ ligature, which is
> not a US-ASCII character:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
> <Family-Name>Lecœur</Family-Name>
>
> Should I get an error when I check this document for well-
> formedness? I checked and didn't get an error. I was surprised, as I
> thought that this would be a well-formedness error.

It's not well-formed.

From the XML 1.0 spec [1]:
"It is a fatal error if an XML entity is determined (via default, encoding declaration, or higher-level protocol) to be in a certain encoding but contains byte sequences that are not legal in that encoding."

If you tried this with Xerces-J you'd get a fatal error.

> /Roger
>
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[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-20060816/#charencoding

Michael Glavassevich
XML Parser Development
IBM Toronto Lab
E-mail: [email protected]
E-mail: [email protected]