XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[John Cowan <cowan AT ccil.org>]

Wolfgang Hoschek scripsit:

> Nonetheless, a zero *byte* as an unambigous end-of-document marker  
> would work as long as only ASCII or UTF-8 are used.   

Or most other encodings, including even EBCDIC, with the exception of
the UTF-16 and UTF-32 families.  That's what makes U+0000 termination
better than, say, form feed termination.

> This would be much more straightforward, practical and efficient than
> to append, and scan for, an (encoded) *unicode character* U+0000,
> because, in the general case, the custom Reader would somehow have to
> implement the (non-trivial) XML rules for character encoding detection,
> also to find the encoded U+0000 marker.

By "encoded" I mean character encoding, not XML encoding.  IOW, four
consecutive 0x00 bytes in UTF-32 encodings, two consecutive 0x00 bytes
in UTF-16 encodings, and a single 0x00 byte otherwise.

> In addition, as recently discussed in another thread on this mailing  
> list, an XML parser/serializer tends to be more reliable and  
> efficient if being passed a byte-oriented InputStream/OutputStream,  
> rather than a character-oriented Reader/Writer.

Fair enough, particularly given that there is no way to make a
Java InputStreamReader cough up its encoding except as a string name.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan AT ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarves.
        --Murray Gell-Mann