From: martin@... (Martin v. Loewis)
Date: 2001-11-12T16:38:34+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24908] Re: XML libraries (Re:  Re: ruby and 	webservices)

Bob Hutchison <hutch@xampl.com> writes:

> > So, if the parser support only one encoding, it should be UTF-8,
> > and documents in other encoding should be converted to UTF-8.
> > 
> > Is it good solution?
> 
> 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.

It seems that Ruby needs a conversion library, then. Convert every
input in a different encoding to UTF-8 first, and assume that all
further processing is done in UTF-8. In fact, this is what Expat does
already.

It isn't the "context" that needs to perform the conversion; the
parser could do this as well.

Regards,
Martin