LibXML and the British pound

[Vic Russell]

Hi,

I'm trying to get the British pound (£) symbol through LibXML and just get "£" instead. Any ideas?

Vic

 

[Julian F. Reschke]

Hi,

I'm trying to get the British pound (£) symbol through LibXML and just get "£" instead. Any ideas?

It's the same thing. Where's the problem here?

 

[arachno]

<skip:sarcasm>maybe problem is that it's not british enough =)</skip:sarcasm>

 

[Vic Russell]

Euroverthetop there but thanks

 

[Vic Russell]

I know this is the code, but I get "£" coming out literally in the output.

 

[Johannes Koch]

I know this is the code, but I get "£" coming out literally in the output.

If you really get "£" in the output (code), everthing's fine. If you get "&amp;#163;", there is something wrong.

 

[Richard Tobin]

I know this is the code, but I get "£" coming out literally in the output.

If your output is XML, that doesn't matter.

If your output *isn't* XML, your probably outputting it the wrong way!

-- Richard

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

% I know this is the code, but I get "£" coming out literally in the % output.

Leaving aside whether you should care or not, have you set the encoding to iso-8859-1? If you use the default (utf-8), you won't get a single character in any case.

 

[Julian F. Reschke]

% I know this is the code, but I get "£" coming out literally in the % output.

Leaving aside whether you should care or not, have you set the encoding to iso-8859-1? If you use the default (utf-8), you won't get a single character in any case.

He will still get a single *character*. However, it will be represented by more than one *byte*.

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

% % > In article <bmh6ai$sb4$>,
% >
% > % I know this is the code, but I get "£" coming out literally in the % > % output. % > % > Leaving aside whether you should care or not, have you set the encoding % > to iso-8859-1? If you use the default (utf-8), you won't get a single % > character in any case. % % He will still get a single *character*. However, it will be represented by % more than one *byte*.

Depends what you mean by a byte. Why not call it an octet if you want to be anal about it?

 

[Julian F. Reschke]

% % > In article <bmh6ai$sb4$>,
% >
% > % I know this is the code, but I get "£" coming out literally in the % > % output. % > % > Leaving aside whether you should care or not, have you set the encoding % > to iso-8859-1? If you use the default (utf-8), you won't get a single % > character in any case. % % He will still get a single *character*. However, it will be represented by % more than one *byte*.

Depends what you mean by a byte. Why not call it an octet if you want to be anal about it?

I could.

The issue is that a lot of the confusion about encodings is caused because people do not grasp that a character is not a byte or an octet. Thus it makes a lot of sense to get people to use the right terminology.

 

[Vic Russell]

Fixed it!! Thanks for all the clues.

I used:-
$xmldoc->setEncoding('UTF-8');

with LibXML and the good old British pound (£) symbol came out a treat. There is life in the old dog yet!

Thanks again,

Vic

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

% The issue is that a lot of the confusion about encodings is caused because % people do not grasp that a character is not a byte or an octet.

Having dealt with people who are confused about encodings for more than a decade, I'd say the confusion about encodings is caused by the almost infinite and unquestionably needless variety of the things. The amount of storage space used to represent each code point has nothing at all to do with it.

As for using the `correct' words, I'm not convinced that imposing an orthodoxy that goes against wide-spread usage is a good way to promote understanding. A lot of meaning in English depends on context, and it's irritating when people go around `correcting' completely unambiguous statements because they think a word has some sacred meaning.

 

[Julian F. Reschke]

% The issue is that a lot of the confusion about encodings is caused because % people do not grasp that a character is not a byte or an octet.

Having dealt with people who are confused about encodings for more than a decade, I'd say the confusion about encodings is caused by the almost infinite and unquestionably needless variety of the things. The amount of storage space used to represent each code point has nothing at all to do with it.

As for using the `correct' words, I'm not convinced that imposing an orthodoxy that goes against wide-spread usage is a good way to promote understanding. A lot of meaning in English depends on context, and it's irritating when people go around `correcting' completely unambiguous statements because they think a word has some sacred meaning.

Well, I have to disagree.

A character is not the same thing as a byte or a octet. It may be *encoded* as one byte.

Most of the time when people are surprised by how UTF-8 works they think they see multiple characters. However, what they really see is a single character that is encoded into multiple bytes. The confusion is caused by using the wrong tool to look at the byte stream (for instance an editor that doesn't handle UTF-8), or using the right tool, but the encoding meta-information was lost (such as when UTF-8 encoded content is sent to a browser, but the content-type is wrong).

Do you really think that trying to explain this won't help?

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

[...]

% Do you really think that trying to explain this won't help?

It really depends on the context. Most of the time, it doesn't, because an unsurprisingly large part of the population doesn't much care. For instance, without waiting to see how this thread turned out, the OP has evidently solved his problem and got on with his life.