encoding problem fixed

[David Brownell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Kay Michael <Michael.Kay at icl.com>
To: XML Dev <xml-dev at ic.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, July 30, 1999 9:21 AM
Subject: RE: encoding problem fixed


> > You should never use a Reader of any sort when
> > processing XML (unless you have a non-standard Reader class that
> > understands the XML declaration).
>
> I'm not sure about that... There was some debate when SAX was being
> designed. There's an escape clause for XML "provided by an external
> transport protocol" which makes it legitimate to present the parser with a
> stream of characters rather than bytes. I've certainly found this useful
> when the XML is stored in a database rather than a file.

Right.  The general case is data that's not got a URI, or for which
the encoding is recorded externally rather than internally (which
is perfectly legal).

As I noted elsewhere, a better guideline is always to pass a URI to
the InputSource, and only use I/O streams (Reader or InputStream)
with exquisite care.  Reader in the case of data whose encoding is
externally tagged (e.g. MIME entities or database contents); and if
the encoding isn't externally recorded, _only then_ use InputStream.

- Dave



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)