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Re: Diactric in CDATA in XML reponse

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Tom de Neef wrote:

> I encounter a situation where the responseXML of a XMLHttpRequest contains
> a CDATA element, like:
> 
> <xml><mod><![CDATA[some text]]></mod></xml>
> 
> This is used to load data in a table. It works always in FF and in Chrome.
> But in IE8 the table is not always loaded.
> It took me a while to find that the problem is related to the presence of
> a diacritic (ASCII>128) in the CDATA text block. In such cases the
> responseXML is returned by IE with firstChild=null.

It might be helpful for further diagnosis that the referred document object 
implements the IXMLDOMDocument interface which provides an `xml' property 
for its XML serialization. [1]

Generally, it is better to start with `….responseXML.documentElement' or an 
element node found with `….responseXML.getElementsByTagName("…")[…]', 
because the returned XML document may have a preamble (one or more of XML 
declarations, processing instructions, DOCTYPE declaration), which will 
create nodes in the document tree before the root element node.
 
> My question is how to handle this. I presume that I need to specify the
> encoding somewhere.

Make sure that your XML data uses one of the character encodings that XML 
applications must support (UTF-8 and UTF-16), or declare the used character 
encoding. [2]  Not doing that and having incompatible code sequences in the 
XML data leads to the XML document being empty.

Generally, UTF-8 is the best choice for XML data because it can encode all 
Unicode characters without using character references (such as &#x20AC; for 
the Euro sign), is widely supported, and in most cases has the smallest 
footprint while having all these properties.

This is not so much of an issue with characters with code point below U+0080 
because in that range most encodings (probably all that encode Latin 
letters) are compatible.  In particular, UTF-8 is compatible with 
Windows-1252 ("ISO-8859-1") below U+0080 (it has the same code sequences for 
the same characters there).  (For example, PHP 5.3.x uses "ISO-8859-1" by 
default.)

I have tested this in Internet Explorer 6.0.2800.1106 with a server-side PHP 
5.3.x application generating an XML 1.0 document from user input in the same 
HTML document.  The XHR object was created with

  new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")

BTW, there are no characters with *ASCII* code beyond 127 (0x7F).  US-ASCII 
is a 7-bit encoding (code points and sequences 0x00 to 0x7F).
 
> The response is in answer to a request of the form
>     asyncRequestor.open("POST",d2w.appID,true);
>     asyncRequestor.setRequestHeader("Content-type","application/x-www-
form-urlencoded");
>     asyncRequestor.send(txt);

If `asyncRequestor' would hold a reference to an object implementing the 
IXMLHTTPRequest, XMLHttpRequest or XMLHttpRequest2 interface, you would need 
to define an event listener for the `readystatechange' or `load' event.  As 
there is no such definition in the posted code, one could assume that 
`asyncRequestor' is referring to a user-defined object, in which case one 
would be left with guessing what actually happens.  Only in this case it is 
apparent that the method of submitting the HTTP request is not relevant.


PointedEars
___________
[1] <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ms757878(v=vs.85).aspx>
[2] <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charencoding>
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(This won't prevent people from viewing your source, but no one
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Diactric in CDATA in XML reponse "Tom de Neef" <tdeneef@qolor.nl> - 2012-09-21 22:06 +0200
  Re: Diactric in CDATA in XML reponse Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2012-09-22 03:46 +0200
    Re: Diactric in CDATA in XML reponse "Tom de Neef" <tdeneef@qolor.nl> - 2012-09-22 15:12 +0200
      Re: Diactric in CDATA in XML reponse Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2012-09-22 16:46 +0200
        Re: Diactric in CDATA in XML reponse "Tom de Neef" <tdeneef@qolor.nl> - 2012-09-22 19:31 +0200
          Re: Diactric in CDATA in XML reponse Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2012-09-22 21:12 +0200

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