Learning XML, 2nd Edition

Character Encodings

Throughout the book, I have treated characters as a sort of commodity, just something used to fill up documents. But understanding characters and how they are represented in documents is of great importance in XML. After all, characters are both the building material for markup and the cargo it was meant to carry.

Every XML document has a character encoding property. I’ll give you a quick explanation now and a more complete description later. In a nutshell, it is the way the numerical values in files and streams are transformed into the symbols that you see on the screen. Encodings come in many different kinds, reflecting the cultural diversity of users, the capabilities of systems, and the inevitable cycle of progress and obsolescence.

Character encodings are probably the most confusing topic in the study of XML. Partly, this is because of a glut of acronyms and confusing names: UTF-8, UCS-4, Shift-JIS, and ISO-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1, to name a few. Also hampering our efforts to understand is the interchangeability of incompatible terms. Sometimes a character encoding is called a set, as in the MIME standard, which is incorrect and misleading.

In this section, I will try to explain the terms and concepts clearly, and describe some of the common character encodings in use by XML authors.

Specifying an Encoding

If you choose to experiment with the character encoding for your document, you will need to specify it in the XML declaration. For example:

<?xml version="1.0" ...