XML Basic

XML JavaScript

XML Advanced

XML Examples

XML Encoding

XML documents can contain non ASCII characters, like Norwegian æ ø å , or French ê è é.

To avoid errors, specify the XML encoding, or save XML files as Unicode.

XML Encoding Errors

If you load an XML document, you can get two different errors indicating encoding problems:

An invalid character was found in text content.

You get this error if your XML contains non ASCII characters, and the file was saved as single-byte ANSI (or ASCII) with no encoding specified.

Single byte XML file with encoding attribute.

Same single byte XML file with no encoding attribute.

Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported.

You get this error if your XML file was saved as double-byte Unicode (or UTF-16) with a single-byte encoding (Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8) specified.

You also get this error if your XML file was saved with single-byte ANSI (or ASCII), with double-byte encoding (UTF-16) specified.

Double byte XML file without encoding.

Same double byte XML file with single byte encoding.

Windows Notepad

Windows Notepad save files as single-byte ANSI (ASCII) by default.

If you select "Save as...", you can specify ANSI, UTF-8, Unicode(UTF-16), or Unicode Big.

Experiment with the XML below (without any coding attribute), and save it as ANSI, UTF-8, and Unicode.

Try to drag the files into your browser, ands see the result. Different browsers will display different results.

Experiment with different encodings:

Try these:

Note saved with right encoding

Note saved with wrong encoding

Conclusion

• Always use the encoding attribute
• Use an editor that supports encoding
• Make sure you know what encoding the editor uses
• Use the same encoding in your encoding attribute