Re: Handling £ (pound sterling) symbols in content

Thanks Grant....that fixed it.

The database originally started with a DOS application and still encodes 
'£' symbols weirdly, so my other (non-Perl) Windows application was 
extracting the data into XML and adding the correct '£' symbol, but I 
was not specifying the encoding as you pointed out.

If I specify "WINDOWS-1252" or "ISO-8859-1" my XML::Twig code can parse 
it without a problem. I'll probably use the former because I suspect 
there are Euro symbols in the data somewhere.

Much appreciated
-- 
Neil Hughes


On 27/6/09 22:39, Grant McLean wrote:
> Hi Neil
> 
> You need to determine what encoding has been used by the database export
> process.
> 
> If you're working with a Windows system then the most likely guess is
> that the data is encoded with CP1252 or 'Win-Latin-1'.  In which case
> the first line of the XML file should specify an encoding like this:
> 
>   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="WINDOWS-1252" ?>
> 
> If the data was encoded with UTF-8 then the XML parser module would have
> recognised it automatically, so you can eliminate that option.
> 
> You can also safely assume that the data is not in ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1),
> because that encoding pre-dates the definition of the Euro symbol.
> 
> Encodings in XML (and Perl) are a largish subject with many subtleties,
> you can read more here:
> 
>   http://perl-xml.sourceforge.net/faq/#encodings
> 
> Cheers
> Grant
> 
> On Sat, 2009-06-27 at 22:24 +0100, Neil Hughes wrote:
>> I've hit a problem in XML::Twig trying to handle data exported from a 
>> legacy database, but I suspect this is an issue I need to get some 
>> advice on regardless of the parser...
>>
>> The data contains '£' symbols which I'm struggling to format in XML for 
>> processing later on. The following code might help explain:
>>
>> ------------ BEGIN --------------
>>
>> use strict;
>> use warnings;
>>
>> use XML::Twig;
>>
>> my $t= XML::Twig->new();
>>
>> # this is OK
>> #my $input = '<?xml 
>> version="1.0"?><root><item>one</item><item>two</item><item>three</item></root>'; 
>>
>>
>> # this is invalid
>> #my $input = '<?xml version="1.0"?><root><item>one 
>> £</item><item>two</item><item>three</item></root>';
>>
>> # this is OK
>> #my $input = '<?xml 
>> version="1.0"?><root><item><![CDATA[one]]></item><item><![CDATA[two]]></item><item><![CDATA[three]]></item></root>'; 
>>
>>
>> # this is invalid
>> my $input = '<?xml version="1.0"?><root><item><![CDATA[one 
>> £]]></item><item><![CDATA[two]]></item><item><![CDATA[three]]></item></root>'; 
>>
>>
>> $t->parse($input);
>> $t->print;
>>
>> ------------ END --------------
>>
>> Whether I wrap my text data in CDATA or not, as soon as I include a 
>> pound sterling symbol I get the following error:
>>
>> not well-formed (invalid token) at line 1, column 46, byte 46 at 
>> /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.8/lib/XML/Parser.pm line 187
>>   at /Users/nkh/Documents/Dev/Perl/xml_twig/pound_test1.pl line 14
>>
>> Byte 46 seems to align with the '£', so I'm wondering what I need to do 
>> to get this character not to break the parser.
>>
> 
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