The characters are going to get displayed at some point. If the wrong encoding is used, they are going to be displayed as junk. The Hebrew is not going to be look right when displayed as Russian.

Now, most systems deal with this by context. Everyone uses the same encoding for input and output and it all works. Until someone uses a different locale. Or they cut-and-paste from an app that doesn't declare the encoding. Or they send the file/email/database to someone else.

Also, XML is logically defined as using Unicode characters. Files either have the default encoding of UTF-16 or UTF-8, or they must declare the encoding. Many parsers will convert from the declared encoding to Unicode strings and only deal with Unicode.

Your choices are to: a) figure out what encoding is being used and mark the XML with that; b) generate invalid XML by not marking the encoding and using 8-bit bytes instead of UTF-8; c) finding a safe encoding and transforming the Unicode back into binary bytes; d) transcoding to UTF-8 and using that everywhere. a and d are the best solutions and are standard.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: 8-bit Clean XML Data I/O? by iburrell
in thread 8-bit Clean XML Data I/O? by samtregar

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