From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-11-12T02:51:53+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24884] Re: XML libraries (Re:  Re: ruby and webservices)

Bob Hutchison wrote:

> No I don't think so. How you represent the character stream internally is
> entirely up to you (immediate *internal* conversion to UTF-8 by your
> parser is OK). Restricting input to UTF-8 will place an impossible to live
> with constraint on the use of your parser. Presumably having an XML parser
> is to allow ruby programs to participate in a larger context -- and this
> larger context isn't going to provide encoding conversions.

Then we have a problem.

Until Ruby regular expressions (and Ruby Strings in general) support 
UTF-16, supporting UTF-16 is going to be problematic in any Ruby 
application.

I see two solutions:

1) implement a byte-wise implementation of an XML parser in Ruby, and 
support UTF-16 explicitly, and
2) use a native XML parser, like XMLParser does, and support UTF-16 on the 
Ruby side explicitly.

(1) would be very slow.  REXML is as fast as it is because it uses the 
native Ruby REGEX code to do most of the grunt-work of the parsing.  Both 
would be troublesome for users.

The best solution, of course, is for UTF-16 support natively in Ruby.  Then 
all of the Ruby XML parsers would automatically become UTF-16 compliant -- 
or, at least, with minimal code tweaking.

--- SER


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