[RESOLVED] php manual detail about SAX and encoding XML

sela

Hi Everyone!

I found an obscure passage in the php manual when I read the page http://www.php.net/manual/en/xml.encoding.php.

The documentation states that "PHP's internal representation of the document is always encoded with UTF-8."

Why it is always encoded with UTF-8?

What does it mean "internal representation of the document"?

Could I ask you to clarify this sentence?

Thanks in advance.

Weedpacket

sela wrote:
Why it is always encoded with UTF-8?

Because that's the internal coding used by libxml, which the XML parser is based on.

What does it mean "internal representation of the document"?

The encoding used within the library for all text, which might or might not be the same as the encoding you use to supply the text, or the encoding you ask for when getting text out. See http://www.xmlsoft.org/encoding.html

sela

A few more questions.

"PHP's internal representation of the document is always encoded with UTF-8."
This mean that if the xml_parser_create() does not set the encoding, the default output charset is UTF-8?
According to "The optional encoding specifies the character encoding for the input/output in PHP 4. Starting from PHP 5, the input encoding is automatically detected, so that the encoding parameter specifies only the output encoding. (…)
In PHP 5.0.0 and 5.0.1, the default output charset is ISO-8859-1, while in PHP 5.0.2 and upper is UTF-8. The supported encodings are ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 and US-ASCII."

"The default source encoding used by PHP is ISO-8859-1." Is this mean that the document contain an XML declaration with
the default encoding declaration which is ISO-8859-1? What is the default encoding declaration?

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<root>
<heading></heading>
<element></element>
</root>

I kindly ask you to correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks in advance.

sela

It seems to me that now I understood. So thank you for your help.