Re: [Vtd-xml-users] 1.6 bug:

[Tatu S. <cow...@ya...>]

--- Mark Swanson <ma...@Sc...> wrote:

> Tatu Saloranta wrote:
...
> > Really? I wouldn't have though xpp would do that,
> > since
> > I thought it aims to be an actual xml conformant
> > parser...
> > 
> > What kind of scrubbing does it do?
> 
> I haven't tested it exhaustively, but I do know that
> it silently ignores 
> 0x0c (form feed) because this is where I noticed my
> old code parsed some 
> XML properly (contained 0x0c) and my replacement
> code based on vtd failed.

Ok. It is likely it accepts all codes <= 0x0020 as
white space -- that's usually pretty reasonable
way to do it with string tokenization.

...
> > Which industries rely on broken xml content being
> > processed? (an honest question, no sarcasm
> intended)
> 
> It wasn't that long ago that some systems used these
> control characters 
> and some devices/software are still using them. Some
> financial systems I 
> work with today still use FS/GS/STX/ETX, and the
> 0x0c data is coming 
> directly from Outlook MAPI data (event
> descriptions). I'm not sure 
> exactly how someone is copy/pasting 0x0c characters
...
> The problem is real; it's ugly, and I hope VTD will

Ok, gotcha. Now that you describe it, I think I
understand
it bit better. And in fact this is part of a more
general
problem of how to transfer binary data with(in) xml.
Control characters are the most obvious problem, but
not the only ones. There are other illegal xml
characters
that would likewise cause problems... the most
commonly
used (but not optimal obviously) solution is to use
something like base64.

One more thing -- xml 1.1 actually does allow these
control characters (although not null byte) to be
included, via character entities. It's too bad, then,
that xml 1.1 has other problems that make it DOA,
rarely used anywhere (you can google for various
people's reasoning why xml 1.1 sucks -- I have my
own pet peeves -- byt I did work on making Woodstox
parser support xml 1.1 nonetheless).

Of course, since you don't control the generation of
input files this is bit of a moot point. ;-)

-+ Tatu +-


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