Just to follow-up on this problem:

The problem with data coming from a browser is often that XML::Simple cannot load a file because XML::Parser normally expects a UTF-8 encoded document and die when fed latin1 characters of HTML entities.

My quick'n dirty trick in this case is to add the following at the top of the document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE CHATTER SYSTEM "dummy.dtd" []>

[download]

The first line is the XML declaration, which in this case includes an encoding declaration that tells XML::Parser to accept latin1 characters. You can also use the ProtocolEncoding option in XML::Parser to get the same result.This takes care of characters above 127 (note that this will not be of much help if lexicon starts posting Japanese characters in shift-JIS for example)

The second line takes care of HTML entities. By declaring a fake Document Type Definition (DTD) we tell the parser that entities might be defined in an external file. The file does not even have to exist, XML::Parser will not try to open it by default, but the effect is that if will not complain about undefined entities.

Of course then XML::Parser will happily convert characters above 127 to UTF-8 and we have to resort to tricks to convert them back to latin1, but at least we have loaded the document and we can work with it.

In reply to Re: Regex to encode entities in XML by mirod
in thread Regex to encode entities in XML by epoptai

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