So while in Sweden one of the things I have been working on required me to output some XML from a view. I have a standard function which I use to encode text so that it will work correctly. But I learned two things which may well be blindingly obvious to you but were new to me…
Firstly, if you’re using a European character set which has lots of high number ASCII characters in then you want to be using ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8, as your XML encoding style:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
Second, where I had just encoded the basic 5 characters in the past: <, >, ", ‘ and &, you also need to translate any character with an ASCII code above 127 to it’s XML representation. So my new XMLEncode function looks like this:
Function XMLEncode (TextData As String) As String
Dim MyChar As String
Dim F_XML As String
Dim i As Integer
F_XML=""
For i=1 To Len(TextData)
MyChar=Mid(TextData,i,1)
Select Case MyChar
Case "<"
F_XML= F_XML & "<"
Case ">"
F_XML= F_XML & ">"
Case |"|
F_XML= F_XML & """
Case "’"
F_XML= F_XML & "’"
Case "&"
F_XML= F_XML & "&"
Case Else
If Asc(myChar) > 127 Then
F_XML = F_XML & "&#" + Cstr(Asc(myChar)) + ";"
Else
F_XML= F_XML & MyChar
End If
End Select
Next
XMLEncode=F_XML
End Function
PS: I have only changed the bold lines above, I don’t think I wrote the rest of the function but I can’t remember where i got it from so if you recognise it please let me know and I’ll add your credits!
