Re: xmlrpc and charset=utf-8

I first sent this from the wrong email account, so if that post somehow makes 
its way onto the list, then please forgive the repitition.

On Monday 19 June 2006 13:35, Kazuhiro NISHIYAMA wrote:
> > Was this ever addressed?  I vote for both a default of
> > utf8 and an accessor method.
>
> http://www.zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC3023/Output/chapter8.html#sub5
>
> | This example shows text/xml with the charset parameter omitted.
> | In this case, MIME and XML processors MUST assume the charset is
> | "us-ascii"

This is interesting.  It seems to be at odds with the XML specification, which 
says:

	http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PER-xml-20060614/#charencoding

	> In the absence of information provided by an external transport protocol
	> (e.g. HTTP or MIME), it is a fatal error for an entity including an
	> encoding declaration to be presented to the XML processor in an encoding
	> other than that named in the declaration, or for an entity which begins
	> with neither a Byte Order Mark nor an encoding declaration to use an
	> encoding other than UTF-8. Note that since ASCII is a subset of UTF-8,
	> ordinary ASCII entities do not strictly need an encoding declaration.

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.

Now, granted, RFC3023 is a transport protocol, and they're basically saying 
that if you don't specific the encoding then assume that the content is 
US-ASCII.  However, I find it strange that they specifically require XML 
processors to assume that unannotated documents are ASCII encoded, which is 
in opposition to the XML spec.

In any case, it appears that the Ruby XML-RPC library is handling data 
correctly, while the C library is not (since it appears to be ignoring the 
HTTP header encoding information).

--- SER

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