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.
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.
Windows Notepad
Windows Notepad save files as single-byte ANSI (ASCII) by default.
If you select "Save as...", you can specify double-byte Unicode (UTF-16).
Save the XML file below as Unicode (note that the document does not contain any encoding attribute):
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<note>
<from>Jani</from>
<to>Tove</to>
<message>Norwegian: æøå. French: êèé</message>
</note>
<note>
<from>Jani</from>
<to>Tove</to>
<message>Norwegian: æøå. French: êèé</message>
</note>
The file above, note_encode_none_u.xml will NOT generate an error. But if you specify a single-byte encoding it will.
The following encoding (open it), will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>
The following encoding (open it), will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
The following encoding (open it), will give an error message:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
The following encoding (open it), will NOT give an error:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
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
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