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  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. &#8230;
  42. <a name="findhandlerfunction"></a><img src="images/callouts/3.png" alt="3" border="0">handler = xmlFindCharEncodingHandler(encoding);
  43. &#8230;
  44. <a name="callconversionfunction"></a><img src="images/callouts/4.png" alt="4" border="0">handler-&gt;input(out, &amp;out_size, in, &amp;temp);
  45. &#8230;
  46. <a name="outputencoding"></a><img src="images/callouts/5.png" alt="5" border="0">xmlSaveFormatFileEnc("-", doc, encoding, 1);
  47. </pre><p>
  48. </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
  49. <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
  50. to be given the size of the input and output strings, which are
  51. calculated here for strings <tt class="varname">in</tt> and
  52. <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
  53. argument the data's initial encoding and searches
  54. <span class="application">libxml's</span> built-in set of conversion
  55. handlers, returning a pointer to the function or NULL if none is
  56. 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>
  57. requires as its arguments pointers to the input and output strings,
  58. along with the length of each. The lengths must be determined
  59. 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
  60. <tt class="function">xmlSaveFormatFileEnc</tt>, specifying the
  61. encoding.</p></td></tr></table></div><p>
  62. </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>