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Chapter 26. Character Sets

By default, an XML parser assumes that XML documents are written in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. However, documents may instead be written in any character set the XML processor understands, provided that there's either some external metadata like an HTTP header or internal metadata like a byte order mark or an encoding declaration that specifies the character set. For example, a document written in the Latin-5 character set would need this XML declaration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-9"?>

Most good XML processors understand many common character sets. The XML specification recommends the character names shown in Table 26-1. When using any of these character sets, you should use these names. Of these character sets, only UTF-8 and UTF-16 must be supported by all XML processors, though many XML processors support all character sets listed here, and many support additional character sets besides. When using character sets not listed here, you should use the names specified in the IANA character sets registry at http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets.

Table 26-1. Character set names defined by the XML 1.0 specification

Name

Character set

UTF-8

The default encoding used in XML documents, unless an encoding declaration, byte order mark, or external metadata specifies otherwise; a variable-width encoding of Unicode that uses one to six bytes per character. UTF-8 is designed such that all ASCII documents are legal UTF-8 documents, which is not true for other character sets, such as UTF-16 and Latin-1. This character set is the best encoding choice if your XML documents contain limited Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.

UTF-16

A two-byte encoding of Unicode in which all Unicode characters defined in Unicode 3.0 and earlier (including the ASCII characters) occupy exactly two bytes. However, characters from planes 1 through 14, added in Unicode 3.1 and later, are encoded using surrogate pairs of 4 bytes each. This encoding is the best choice if your XML documents contain substantial amounts of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.

ISO-10646-UCS-2

The Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode, i.e., plane 0. This character set is the same as UTF-16, except that it does not allow surrogate pairs to represent characters with code points beyond 65,535. The difference is only significant in Unicode 3.1 and later. Each Unicode character is represented as exactly one two-byte, unsigned integer. Determining endianness requires a byte-order mark at the beginning of the file.

ISO-10646-UCS-4

A four-byte encoding of Unicode in which each Unicode character is represented as exactly one four-byte, unsigned integer. Determining endianness requires a byte-order mark at the beginning of the file.

ISO-8859-1

Latin-1, ASCII plus the characters needed for most Western European languages, including Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, Flemish, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Some non-European languages, such as Hawaiian, Indonesian, and Swahili, also use these characters.

ISO-8859-2

Latin-2, ASCII plus the characters needed for most Central European languages, including Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, and Slovenian.

ISO-8859-3

Latin-3, ASCII plus the characters needed for Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish, and Galician. Latin-5, ISO-8859-9, however, is now preferred for Turkish.

ISO-8859-4

Latin-4, ASCII plus the characters needed for the Baltic languages Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, and Lappish. Now largely replaced by ISO-8859-10, Latin-6.

ISO-8859-5

ASCII plus the Cyrillic characters used for Byelorussian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian.

ISO-8859-6

ASCII plus Arabic

ISO-8859-7

ASCII plus modern Greek.

ISO-8859-8

ASCII plus Hebrew.

ISO-8859-9

Latin-5, which is essentially the same as Latin-1 (ASCII plus Western Europe), except that the Turkish letters Figure , 1, Figure , Figure , Figure , and Figure replace the less-commonly used Icelandic letters Figure , Figure , Figure , Figure , Figure , and Figure .

ISO-8859-10

Latin-6, which covers the characters needed for the Northern European languages Estonian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Inuit, and Lappish. It's similar to Latin-4, but drops some symbols and the Latvian letter, Figure adds a few extra letters needed for Inuit and Lappish, and moves various characters around. ISO-8859-13 now supersedes this character set.

ISO-8859-11

Adds the Thai alphabet to basic ASCII. However, it is not well supported by current XML parsers, and you're probably better off using Unicode instead.

ISO-8859-12

Not yet in existence and unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future. At one point, this character set was considered for Devanagari, so the number was reserved. However, this effort is not yet off the ground, and it now seems likely that the increasing acceptance of Unicode will make such a character set unnecessary.

ISO-8859-13

Another character set designed to cover the Baltic languages. This set adds back in the Latvian letter Figure and other symbols dropped from Latin-6.

ISO-8859-14

Latin-8; a variant of Latin-1 with extra letters needed for Gaelic and Welsh, such as Figure , Figure , and Figure . These letters mostly replace punctuation marks, such as x and |.

ISO-8859-15

Known officially as Latin-9 and unofficially as Latin-0; a revision of Latin-1 that replaces the international currency symbol ¤ with the Euro sign Figure . It also replaces the seldom-used fraction characters 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 with the uncommon French letters , Figure , Figure , Figure and the ¬, Figure , and ′ symbols with the Finnish letters Figure , Figure , and Figure . Otherwise, it's identical to ISO-8859-1.

ISO-8859-16

Latin-10; intended primarily for Romanian.

ISO-2022-JP

A seven-bit encoding of the character set defined in the Japanese national standard JIS X-0208-1997 used on web pages and in email; see RFC 1468.

Shift_JIS

The encoding of the Japanese national standard character set JIS X-0208-1997 used in Microsoft Windows.

EUC-JP

The encoding of the Japanese national standard character set JIS X-0208-1997 used by most Unixes.

Some parsers do not understand all these encodings. Specifically, parsers based on James Clark's
expat often support only UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, and US-ASCII encodings. Xerces-C supports ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS4, IBM037, IBM1140, ISO-8859-1, and Windows-1252. IBM's XML4C parser, derived from the Xerces codebase, adds over 100 more encodings, including ISO-8859 character sets 1 through 9 and 15. However, for maximum cross-parser compatibility, you should convert your documents to either UTF-8 or UTF-16 before publishing them, even if you author them in another character set.

26.1. Character Tables

The XML 1.0 specification divides Unicode into five overlapping sets:

Name characters
Characters that can appear in an element, attribute, or entity name. These characters are letters, ideographs, digits, and the punctuation marks _, -, ., and :. In the tables that follow, name characters are shown in bold type, such as A, Å, Figure , Figure , Figure , 1, 2, 3, Figure , Figure , and _.

Name start characters
Characters that can be the first character of an element, attribute, or entity name. These characters are letters, ideographs, and the underscore _. In the tables that follow, these characters are shown with a gray background, such as A, Å, Figure , Figure ,Figure , Figure , Figure , and _. Because name start characters are a subset of name characters, they are also shown in bold.

Character data characters
All characters that can be used anywhere in an XML document, including element and attribute content, comments, and DTDs. This set includes almost all Unicode characters, except for surrogates and most C0 control characters. These characters are shown in a normal typeface. If they are name characters, then they will be bold. If they are also name start characters, they'll have a gray background.

Illegal characters
Characters that may not appear anywhere in an XML document, such as in part of a name, character data, or comment text. These characters are shown in italic, such as NUL or BEL. Most of these characters are either C0 control characters or half of a surrogate pair.

Unassigned code points
Bytes or byte sequences that are not assigned to a character as of Unicode 3.1.1. Theoretically, a program could produce a file containing one of these byte sequences, but their meaning is undefined and they should be avoided. They are represented in the following tables as n/a.

Figure 26-1 shows the relationship between these sets. Note that all name start characters are name characters and that all name characters are character data characters.

Figure 26-1

Figure 26-1. XML's division of Unicode characters

In all the tables that follow, each cell's upper lefthand corner contains the character's two-digit Unicode hexadecimal value and the upper righthand corner contains the character's Unicode decimal value. You can insert a character in an XML document by prefixing the decimal value with &# and suffixing it with a semicolon. Thus, Unicode character 69, the capital letter E, can be written as &#69;. Hexadecimal values work the same way, except that you prefix them with &#x;. In hexadecimal, the letter E is 45, so it can also be written as &#x45;.

26.1.2. ISO-8859-1, Latin-1

Character sets defined by the ISO-8859 standard comprise one popular superset of the ASCII character sets. These characters all provide the normal ASCII characters from code points 0 through 127 and the C1 controls from 128 to 159, as well as change the characters from 160 through 255.

In particular, many Western European and American systems use a character set called Latin-1. This set is the first code page defined in the ISO-8859 standard and is also called ISO-8859-1. Though all common encodings of Unicode map code points 128 through 255 differently than Latin-1, code points 128 through 255 map to the same characters in both Latin-1 and Unicode. This situation does not occur in other character sets.

26.1.2.1. C1 controls

All ISO-8859 character sets begin with the same 32 extra nonprinting control characters in code points 128 through 159. These sets are used on terminals like the DEC VT-320 to provide graphics functionality not included in ASCII, for example, erasing the screen and switching it to inverse video or graphics mode. These characters cause severe problems for anyone reading or editing an XML document on a terminal or terminal emulator.

Fortunately, these characters are not necessary in XML documents. Their inclusion in XML 1.0 was an oversight. They should have been banned like the C0 controls. Unfortunately, many editors and documents incorrectly label documents written in the Cp1252 Windows character set as ISO-8859-1. This character set does use the code points between 128 and 159 for noncontrol graphics characters. When documents written with this character set are displayed or edited on a dumb terminal, they can effectively disable the user's terminal. Similar problems exist with most other Windows code pages for single-byte character sets.

In the spirit of being liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you generate, you should never use Cp1252, correctly labeled or otherwise. You should also avoid using other nonstandard code pages for documents that move beyond a single system. On the other hand, if you receive a document labeled as Cp1252 (or any other Windows code page), it can be displayed if you're careful not to throw it at a terminal unchanged. If you suspect that a document labeled as ISO-8859-1 that uses characters between 128 and 159 is in fact a Cp1252 document, you should probably reject it. This decision is difficult, however, given the prevalence of broken software that does not identify documents sent properly.



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