1: <html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>Encoding Conversion</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.2"><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="Libxml Tutorial"><link rel="up" href="index.html" title="Libxml Tutorial"><link rel="previous" href="ar01s08.html" title="Retrieving Attributes"><link rel="next" href="apa.html" title="A. Compilation"></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Encoding Conversion</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="ar01s08.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center"> </th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="apa.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="xmltutorialconvert"></a>Encoding Conversion</h2></div></div><div></div></div><p><a class="indexterm" name="id2587348"></a>
2: Data encoding compatibility problems are one of the most common
3: difficulties encountered by programmers new to <span class="acronym">XML</span> in
4: general and <span class="application">libxml</span> in particular. Thinking
5: through the design of your application in light of this issue will help
6: avoid difficulties later. Internally, <span class="application">libxml</span>
7: stores and manipulates data in the UTF-8 format. Data used by your program
8: in other formats, such as the commonly used ISO-8859-1 encoding, must be
9: converted to UTF-8 before passing it to <span class="application">libxml</span>
10: functions. If you want your program's output in an encoding other than
11: UTF-8, you also must convert it.</p><p><span class="application">Libxml</span> uses
12: <span class="application">iconv</span> if it is available to convert
13: data. Without <span class="application">iconv</span>, only UTF-8, UTF-16 and
14: ISO-8859-1 can be used as external formats. With
15: <span class="application">iconv</span>, any format can be used provided
16: <span class="application">iconv</span> is able to convert it to and from
17: UTF-8. Currently <span class="application">iconv</span> supports about 150
18: different character formats with ability to convert from any to any. While
19: the actual number of supported formats varies between implementations, every
20: <span class="application">iconv</span> implementation is almost guaranteed to
21: support every format anyone has ever heard of.</p><div class="warning" style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in;"><table border="0" summary="Warning"><tr><td rowspan="2" align="center" valign="top" width="25"><img alt="[Warning]" src="images/warning.png"></td><th align="left">Warning</th></tr><tr><td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top"><p>A common mistake is to use different formats for the internal data
22: in different parts of one's code. The most common case is an application
23: that assumes ISO-8859-1 to be the internal data format, combined with
24: <span class="application">libxml</span>, which assumes UTF-8 to be the
25: internal data format. The result is an application that treats internal
26: data differently, depending on which code section is executing. The one or
27: the other part of code will then, naturally, misinterpret the data.
28: </p></td></tr></table></div><p>This example constructs a simple document, then adds content provided
29: at the command line to the document's root element and outputs the results
30: to <tt class="filename">stdout</tt> in the proper encoding. For this example, we
31: use ISO-8859-1 encoding. The encoding of the string input at the command
32: line is converted from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. Full code: <a href="aph.html" title="H. Code for Encoding Conversion Example">Appendix H, <i>Code for Encoding Conversion Example</i></a></p><p>The conversion, encapsulated in the example code in the
33: <tt class="function">convert</tt> function, uses
34: <span class="application">libxml's</span>
35: <tt class="function">xmlFindCharEncodingHandler</tt> function:
36: </p><pre class="programlisting">
37: <a name="handlerdatatype"></a><img src="images/callouts/1.png" alt="1" border="0">xmlCharEncodingHandlerPtr handler;
38: <a name="calcsize"></a><img src="images/callouts/2.png" alt="2" border="0">size = (int)strlen(in)+1;
39: out_size = size*2-1;
40: out = malloc((size_t)out_size);
41:
42: …
43: <a name="findhandlerfunction"></a><img src="images/callouts/3.png" alt="3" border="0">handler = xmlFindCharEncodingHandler(encoding);
44: …
45: <a name="callconversionfunction"></a><img src="images/callouts/4.png" alt="4" border="0">handler->input(out, &out_size, in, &temp);
46: …
47: <a name="outputencoding"></a><img src="images/callouts/5.png" alt="5" border="0">xmlSaveFormatFileEnc("-", doc, encoding, 1);
48: </pre><p>
49: </p><div class="calloutlist"><table border="0" summary="Callout list"><tr><td width="5%" valign="top" align="left"><a href="#handlerdatatype"><img src="images/callouts/1.png" alt="1" border="0"></a> </td><td valign="top" align="left"><p><tt class="varname">handler</tt> is declared as a pointer to an
50: <tt class="function">xmlCharEncodingHandler</tt> function.</p></td></tr><tr><td width="5%" valign="top" align="left"><a href="#calcsize"><img src="images/callouts/2.png" alt="2" border="0"></a> </td><td valign="top" align="left"><p>The <tt class="function">xmlCharEncodingHandler</tt> function needs
51: to be given the size of the input and output strings, which are
52: calculated here for strings <tt class="varname">in</tt> and
53: <tt class="varname">out</tt>.</p></td></tr><tr><td width="5%" valign="top" align="left"><a href="#findhandlerfunction"><img src="images/callouts/3.png" alt="3" border="0"></a> </td><td valign="top" align="left"><p><tt class="function">xmlFindCharEncodingHandler</tt> takes as its
54: argument the data's initial encoding and searches
55: <span class="application">libxml's</span> built-in set of conversion
56: handlers, returning a pointer to the function or NULL if none is
57: found.</p></td></tr><tr><td width="5%" valign="top" align="left"><a href="#callconversionfunction"><img src="images/callouts/4.png" alt="4" border="0"></a> </td><td valign="top" align="left"><p>The conversion function identified by <tt class="varname">handler</tt>
58: requires as its arguments pointers to the input and output strings,
59: along with the length of each. The lengths must be determined
60: separately by the application.</p></td></tr><tr><td width="5%" valign="top" align="left"><a href="#outputencoding"><img src="images/callouts/5.png" alt="5" border="0"></a> </td><td valign="top" align="left"><p>To output in a specified encoding rather than UTF-8, we use
61: <tt class="function">xmlSaveFormatFileEnc</tt>, specifying the
62: encoding.</p></td></tr></table></div><p>
63: </p></div><div class="navfooter"><hr><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="ar01s08.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="index.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="apa.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Retrieving Attributes </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> A. Compilation</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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