XML Encoding
XML documents can contain non ASCII characters, like Norwegian æ ø å , or French ê è é.
To avoid errors, specify the XML encoding, or save XML files as
Unicode.
XML Encoding Errors
If you load an XML document, you can get two different errors
indicating encoding problems:
An invalid character was found in text content.
You get this error if your XML
contains non ASCII characters, and the file was saved as
single-byte ANSI (or ASCII) with no encoding specified.
Single byte XML file with encoding
attribute.
Same single byte XML file with no
encoding attribute.
Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported.
You get this error if your XML file was saved as double-byte Unicode (or UTF-16)
with a single-byte encoding (Windows-1252,
ISO-8859-1, UTF-8) specified.
You also get this error if your XML file was saved with single-byte ANSI (or
ASCII), with double-byte
encoding (UTF-16) specified.
Double byte XML file without
encoding.
Same double byte XML file with
single byte encoding.
Windows Notepad
Windows Notepad save files as single-byte ANSI (ASCII) by default.
If you select "Save as...", you can specify double-byte Unicode (UTF-16).
Save the
XML file below as Unicode (note that the document does not contain any encoding
attribute):
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<note>
<from>Jani</from>
<to>Tove</to>
<message>Norwegian: æøå. French: êèé</message>
</note>
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The file above, note_encode_none_u.xml will NOT generate
an error. But if you specify a single-byte encoding it will.
The following encoding (open it),
will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>
|
The following encoding (open it),
will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
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The following encoding (open it),
will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
|
The following encoding (open it), will NOT
give an error:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
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Conclusion
- Always use the encoding attribute
- Use an editor that supports encoding
- Make sure you know what encoding the editor uses
- Use the same encoding in your encoding attribute
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