[jdom-interest] PLEASE store ALL files (not the classes) in the jar-file in UTF-16

Jason Hunter jhunter at acm.org
Sat Jul 7 08:44:39 PDT 2001


If we stored the text files in UTF-16 (two bytes per char) then the
files would become unreadable by Windows users using Notepad and Unix
users using vi.  If you want to read the file on OS/390 I'm OK with
requiring the user to know how to convert ASCII to EBCDIC.  :-)

As for making "java -jar jdom.jar" work, XML parsers should be able to
handle ASCII files even on OS/390.  The default encoding is UTF-8 and
per the XML spec: "Note that since ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, ordinary
ASCII entities do not strictly need an encoding declaration."  If it
doesn't work, it's a parser bug.

-jh-

Markus Bernhardt wrote:
> 
> Hi !
> 
> I would appreciate it very much, if all text files
> (at the moment 'info.xml') could be stored using UTF-16.
> Info.xml is not used at runtime (or?), so it will make no
> problems, but there are some platforms which cant handle
> this file.
> 
> Reason:
> On an OS/390 mainframe we have not ASCII, but EBCDIC encoding.
> Without using UTF-16 this generates unbelievable side effects.
> 
> BTW: Ever tried running xerces, xalan or fop on a mainframe ?
> Interesting experience.
> 
> - markus



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