Re: Re: Problem with UTF-8

On 14 Sep 2007, at 13:01, Ulrich Schaefer wrote:

> John Wilson schrieb:
>> Most software I know of which consumes XML over HTTP will ignore the
>> charset. The problem is that it is almost always wrong (e.g. it is
>> omitted but the encoding of the document is not US-ASCII).
>>
>> I'm pretty sure that Apache XML-RPC ignores the Content-type  
>> encoding.
>>
>>
> I agree.
>
> (the following is from my longish experiments with XML-RPC
> interoperability several months ago)
>
> Due to an "underspecification" in the initial XML-RPC specification,
> there is no guarantee that different implementations really treat 8  
> bit
> encoded strings such as UTF-8, ISO-8859-X or EUC-JP correctly in both
> directions.
> The only thing that is defined for the string data type is exchange  
> of 7
> bit US-ASCII characters. Playing with headers may help, but not
> necessarily, depending on the implementations used (I'm talking about
> *existing* XML-RPC implementations; using the same Java XML-RPC
> implementation at both ends e.g. is no problem).
> My solution (without patching the XML-RPC libraries) for properly
> connecting Python clients with a Java Server was to implement the
> transfer via the binary data type (base64-encoded) with encoding and
> decoding from/to Unicode at both ends. This is bad because of the
> transcoding overhead, but formed the only solution for bidirectional
> Unicode text exchange that worked correctly even for Japanese
> characters. I can send Java & Python code examples if requested.

I have implemented XML-RPC twice. Both times I did not emit an XML  
header but used numeric character references (i.e. things like  
ģ) for all code points > 127. This seems to work quite well as  
all implementations I have tested understand numeric character  
references (no doubt there are some which do not - I just haven't  
seen them).

I would recommend this approach to all implementers.

John Wilson

 
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