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</style><title>Encodings support</title></head><body bgcolor="#8b7765" text="#000000" link="#a06060" vlink="#000000"><table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" align="center"><tr><td width="120"><a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/"><img src="epatents.png" alt="Action against software patents" /></a></td><td width="180"><a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img src="gnome2.png" alt="Gnome2 Logo" /></a><a href="http://www.w3.org/Status"><img src="w3c.png" alt="W3C Logo" /></a><a href="http://www.redhat.com/"><img src="redhat.gif" alt="Red Hat Logo" /></a><div align="left"><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/"><img src="Libxml2-Logo-180x168.gif" alt="Made with Libxml2 Logo" /></a></div></td><td><table border="0" width="90%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" align="center" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#fffacd"><tr><td align="center"><h1>The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome</h1><h2>Encodings support</h2></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="100%" align="center"><tr><td bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="100%"><tr><td valign="top" width="200" bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Main Menu</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><form action="search.php" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="get"><input name="query" type="text" size="20" value="" /><input name="submit" type="submit" value="Search ..." /></form><ul><li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li><li><a href="html/index.html">Reference Manual</a></li><li><a href="intro.html">Introduction</a></li><li><a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li><li><a href="docs.html" style="font-weight:bold">Developer Menu</a></li><li><a href="bugs.html">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li><li><a href="help.html">How to help</a></li><li><a href="downloads.html">Downloads</a></li><li><a href="news.html">Releases</a></li><li><a href="XMLinfo.html">XML</a></li><li><a href="XSLT.html">XSLT</a></li><li><a href="xmldtd.html">Validation & DTDs</a></li><li><a href="encoding.html">Encodings support</a></li><li><a href="catalog.html">Catalog support</a></li><li><a href="namespaces.html">Namespaces</a></li><li><a href="contribs.html">Contributions</a></li><li><a href="examples/index.html" style="font-weight:bold">Code Examples</a></li><li><a href="html/index.html" style="font-weight:bold">API Menu</a></li><li><a href="guidelines.html">XML Guidelines</a></li><li><a href="ChangeLog.html">Recent Changes</a></li></ul></td></tr></table><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Related links</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><ul><li><a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">Mail archive</a></li><li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">XSLT libxslt</a></li><li><a href="http://phd.cs.unibo.it/gdome2/">DOM gdome2</a></li><li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">XML-DSig xmlsec</a></li><li><a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">FTP</a></li><li><a href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/">Windows binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://opencsw.org/packages/libxml2">Solaris binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://www.explain.com.au/oss/libxml2xslt.html">MacOsX binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://lxml.de/">lxml Python bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/XML-LibXML">Perl bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">C++ bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-xmlphp.php#Heading4">PHP bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas/">Pascal bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://libxml.rubyforge.org/">Ruby bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">Tcl bindings</a></li><li><a href="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/issues">Bug Tracker</a></li></ul></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td><td valign="top" bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%"><tr><td><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="100%"><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><p>If you are not really familiar with Internationalization (usual shortcut
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is I18N) , Unicode, characters and glyphs, I suggest you read a <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/06/Unicode">presentation</a>
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by Tim Bray on Unicode and why you should care about it.</p><p>If you don't understand why <b>it does not make sense to have a string
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without knowing what encoding it uses</b>, then as Joel Spolsky said <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html">please do not
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write another line of code until you finish reading that article.</a>. It is
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a prerequisite to understand this page, and avoid a lot of problems with
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libxml2, XML or text processing in general.</p><p>Table of Content:</p><ol>
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<li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
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mean ?</a></li>
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<li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
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why</a></li>
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<li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
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<li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
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<li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
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support</a></li>
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</ol><h3><a name="What" id="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3><p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
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by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
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UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
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is a variable length encoding whose greatest points are to reuse the same
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encoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
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more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per character (and
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sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
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bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
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allows the document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that
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they are clearly labeled as such. For example the following is a wellformed
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XML document encoded in ISO-8859-1 and using accentuated letters that we
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French like for both markup and content:</p><pre><?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
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<très>là </très></pre><p>Having internationalization support in libxml2 means the following:</p><ul>
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<li>the document is properly parsed</li>
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<li>information about it's encoding is saved</li>
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<li>it can be modified</li>
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<li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
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<li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml2 (for
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example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
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</ul><p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml2 API, with the
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exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
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specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
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document.</p><p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml2 now obey
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the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
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an internationalized fashion by libxml2 too:</p><pre><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
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"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
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<html lang="fr">
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<head>
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<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p>W3C crée des standards pour le Web.</body>
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</html></pre><h3><a name="internal" id="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3><p>One of the core decisions was to force all documents to be converted to a
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default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
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rationales for those choices:</p><ul>
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<li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
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users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
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original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
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the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
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client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
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to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
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cases this may make sense.</li>
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<li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
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UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
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is mandatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
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considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
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support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
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with surrounding software:
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<ul>
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<li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
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more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
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than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
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for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
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file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
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architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
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memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
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caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
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that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
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for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
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<li>Most of libxml2 version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
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most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
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requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
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for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
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<li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
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related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
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upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yet another place
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where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
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- they are using UTF-16)</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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</ul><p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml2 user:</p><ul>
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<li>xmlChar, the libxml2 data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
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as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
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is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
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<li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
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the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
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</ul><h3><a name="implemente" id="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3><p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
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(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
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when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
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sequence:</p><ol>
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<li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
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simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-16 and UCS-4 from encodings where
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the ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
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<li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
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declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
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from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
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<li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
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UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
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input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
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You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
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<pre>~/XML -> ./xmllint err.xml
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err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
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<très>là </très>
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^
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err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
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<très>là </très>
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^</pre>
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</li>
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<li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonicalize it, and
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then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
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If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
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it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
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will report an error and stops processing:
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<pre>~/XML -> ./xmllint err2.xml
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err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UnsupportedEnc"?>
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^</pre>
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</li>
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<li>From that point the encoder processes progressively the input (it is
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plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
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and converts on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
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itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
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transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
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been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
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corresponding to this entity).</li>
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<li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
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with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
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</ol><p>Ok then what happens when saving the document (assuming you
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collected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
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called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
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xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
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encoding:</p><ol>
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<li>if no encoding is given, libxml2 will look for an encoding value
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associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
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encoding,
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<p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
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</li>
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<li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
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document, libxml2 will again canonicalize the encoding name, lookup for a
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converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
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function will return an error code</li>
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<li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
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buffer, then libxml2 will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
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that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
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the I/O layer.</li>
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<li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
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trying to push an UTF-8 encoded Chinese character through the UTF-8 to
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ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
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will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
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point libxml2 will decode the offending character, remove it from the
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buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &#123; and
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resume the conversion. This guarantees that any document will be saved
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without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
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a problem in the current version, in practice avoid using non-ascii
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characters for tag or attribute names). A special "ascii" encoding name
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is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
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portability is really crucial</li>
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</ol><p>Here are a few examples based on the same test document and assumin a
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terminal using ISO-8859-1 as the text encoding:</p><pre>~/XML -> ./xmllint isolat1
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
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<très>là </très>
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~/XML -> ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<très>là </très>
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~/XML -> </pre><p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
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processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
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difficult since it is located in a <meta> tag under the <head>,
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so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
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been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
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detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
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(and again reuses the same code).</p><h3><a name="Default" id="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3><p>libxml2 has a set of default converters for the following encodings
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(located in encoding.c):</p><ol>
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<li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
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<li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
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<li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
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<li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
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<li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
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predefined entities like &copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
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</ol><p>More over when compiled on an Unix platform with iconv support the full
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set of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
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linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
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3 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
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various Japanese ones.</p><p>To convert from the UTF-8 values returned from the API to another encoding
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then it is possible to use the function provided from <a href="html/libxml-encoding.html">the encoding module</a> like <a href="html/libxml-encoding.html#UTF8Toisolat1">UTF8Toisolat1</a>, or use the
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POSIX <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/iconv.html">iconv()</a>
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API directly.</p><h4>Encoding aliases</h4><p>From 2.2.3, libxml2 has support to register encoding names aliases. The
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goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
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the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
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iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
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existing encodings. Once registered libxml2 will automatically lookup the
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aliases when handling a document:</p><ul>
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<li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
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<li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
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<li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
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<li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
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</ul><h3><a name="extend" id="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3><p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
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(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write input and output
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conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
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xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
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called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
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(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
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their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
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header.</p><p><a href="bugs.html">Daniel Veillard</a></p></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body></html>
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