Re: xmlrpc and charset=utf-8

On Tuesday 18 September 2007, Martin Duerst wrote:
> >>> I read this to say that XML documents, in the absence of both external
> >>> encoding information or an XML declaration, must be assumed to be
> >>> UTF-8. RFC3023 appears to be saying that XML documents default to
> >>> US-ASCII.
>
> Yes, if they come served with a MIME type of text/xml (without charset
> parameter), because that's part of the definition of text/xml. Absence of
> an explicit "us-ascii" label and absence of information are not the same.
> That all may sound a bit far-fetched, but that's how things are defined in
> the specs, sorry.

If the external transport specifies the encoding, then it is up to the code 
that is processing the transportation to set the encoding of the XML document 
via the API. he XML parser can't know anything about the transport. hat 
is to say, it is *still* not the parser's responsibility to guess that the 
encoding is anything other than UTF-8; it must be told otherwise.

Put another way, the code accepting the content must tell the parser what 
encoding the stream is using, if it is using anything other than UTF-8.

> Adding an accessor is definitely a very good idea. Another idea is to
> change the default to "application/xml". "application/xml" does NOT
> imply US-ASCII, but (unless it comes with a charset parameter) means
> 'look at the XML document itself' (which in case of no BOM and no
> encoding declaration means UTF-8).

Another option is to have XMLRPC explicitly set the encoding to whatever the 
transport says it is. f course, this would require that XMLRPC parse the 
first line of the file and make sure that the encoding isn't already 
specified in the document itself, but that isn't too difficult.

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