XML Encoding

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XML documents can contain non ASCII characters, like India � � � , or French � � �.

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 error:

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.

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.

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: document does not contain any encoding attribute):

<?xml version="1.0"?> <note> <from>saina</from> <to>Guru</to> <message>India: ���. French: ���</message> </note>

The file above will NOT generate an error. But if you specify a single-byte encoding it will.

The Encoding beolw will give an error message:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>

The Encoding beolw will give an error message:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

The Encoding beolw will give an error message:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

The Encoding beolw 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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