accented characters

D

Davide Benini

I cannot get accented charecters in my HTML output...
I have tried to leave the accented characters in and to use iso-8859-1,
but there it doesn't work either.
I have tried to use à entity, but & is a reserved character.
I have tried to use à or ß but the entity is not
recognised, and I get as an output in the browser "à" or "&#223"...
Maybe there is sometheing missing in the header...

This is a sample of my xml text
(the documents is a .php, for the purpuse of getting a variable from a
post...)
----------------
<?
header("Content-type: text/xml");
print '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>';
print '<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="inf-dev.xslt"?>';


?>

<inferno>
<filtro><?=$_POST[filter]?></filtro>
<canto>
<n>1</n>
<passo>
<vv>1</vv>
<dante>
<v>Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita</v>
</dante>
<carson>
<v>Halfway through the story of my life</v>
</carson>
<nota>
<n>Carson introduces story</n>
</nota>
</passo>
<passo>
<vv>14</vv>
<dante>
<v>là dove terminava quella valle é</v>
</dante>
<carson>
<v>hill; here, the valley formed a cul-de-sac</v>
</carson>
<nota>Carson introduces cul-de-sac, often associated to the
alleys of Belfast; local
colour</nota>
</passo>
</canto>
</inferno>
-----------------------
This is the XSL:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0">



<xsl:eek:utput method="html"/>
<xsl:template match="/">

<html>
<xsl:variable name="filter"><xsl:value-of
select="inferno/filtro"/></xsl:variable>
<head>

<title>Inferno: comparazione</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" title="main" href="stile-inf.css"
type="text/css" />

</head>
<body>
<div id="container">

<h1>Inferno</h1>

<h3>Filtro: <xsl:value-of select="inferno/filtro"/></h3>

<xsl:for-each select="inferno/canto">
<div class="cant">
<h2>
Canto <xsl:value-of select="n"/>
</h2>
<xsl:for-each select="passo">



<xsl:if test="contains(nota,$filter)">
<div class="pass">
<table border="0" width="100%">
<tr>
<td colspan="2">
<div class="vv">
<xsl:value-of select="../n"/>,
<xsl:value-of select="vv"/>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width = "50%">
<div class="dant">
<xsl:for-each select="dante/v">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
<br/>
</xsl:for-each>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div class="cars">
<xsl:for-each select="carson/v">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
<br/>
</xsl:for-each>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">
<div class="note">
<xsl:for-each select="nota">
- <xsl:value-of select="."/>
<br/>
</xsl:for-each>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>

<br/>

</xsl:if> <!--CHIUSURA TEST-->
</xsl:for-each>

</div>
</xsl:for-each>

</div>
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

any suggestion?
Thanks,
Davide
 
D

David Carlisle

I have tried to leave the accented characters in and to use iso-8859-1,

If you are typing the characters in iso-8859-1 then you can just type
them directly from your keyboard and then use
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>'
In theory an xml parser is not forced to accept iso-8859-1" encoding but
in practice it will.

You are using
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
which any XML parser will accept but in that case you would want to type
your characters using utf8 encoding. (How to do this would depend on the
system that you are using)

If you want to keep your files as being essentially ascii and use
character references to access non ascii characters then you can use
either UTF-8 or iso-8859-1 as they are the same in the ascii range.

but then you want to use & # 2 2 4 ;

(without spaces)
I have tried to use &agrave; entity, but & is a reserved character.
entities must be defined before use, so if you have not specified a DTD
that defines agrave to be some character you will get an undefined
entity reference error.
I have tried to use &amp;agrave;

By quoting the & you are just specifying the string"& a g r a v e ;" You
are explictly specifying that this is _not_ a reference to teh agrave
entity.
or &amp;#223;

similarly this is just the string "& # 2 2 3 ;" not a character
reference.
You want to use & not &amp; so that you get a character reference
(but 223 is sz you want 224 for a grave)

David
 
D

David Dorward

David said:
which any XML parser will accept but in that case you would want to type
your characters using utf8 encoding.

Not quite. You need to _save_ them using UTF-8.
 
D

Davide Benini

Thanks a lot for yor careful explanation.
Unfortunately my problem persists.
Yet, maybe I am focusing...
The xsl transformation works correctly on Oxygen, my XML editing
software; à è é ì ò ù are all parsed correctly.
Yet when I open the XML page in the browser (Safari on Mac Os X) the
accented vowels turn into strange symbols.
I need to use my xml document inside the browser, since I use it to
generate dynamic content...
For some obscure reason the document doesn't work at all with Firefox
and Camino; yet it is a very simply structured xml document... When
opened with this browsers (both of them use the gecko rendering engine)
I get an error message saying that the xsl document can't be found (but
I assure you it is there!)
I am afraid something is missing in the prolog; I attach again the
prologue of xml and xsl files.
As I specified before, the xml file is actually a php file resulting
into an xml document


XML:

<?
header("Content-type: text/xml");
print '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>';
print'<!DOCTYPE inferno SYSTEM
"file:/Users/davidebenini/Documents/Universita%CC%80/Dottorato/inferno/inferno.dtd">';
print '<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="inf-dev.xslt"?>';
?>
AND HERE THE ACTUAL XML CONTENT FOLLOWS

XSL:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0">

Any suggestion is welcome.
Thanks again
 
D

David Carlisle

For some obscure reason the document doesn't work at all with Firefox

Note that mozilla/firefox is much stricter about mime types and http
headers than IE. I notice that you have given your stylesheet a .xslt
extension, what mime type is it hat servered with from your server?
It will need to be an XML one otherwise mozilla will not use it as a
stylesheet.
Also notice that although youhave a dtd reference mozilla/firefox never
loads an external dtd so if that dtd is needed to define entities or
attribute defaults, these will not work in mozilla.

In either case (mozilla or iE) the encodings specified by the server in
the http headers overrule the encodings specified in <?xml ...

So your php code is writing
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>';
and sending the header header("Content-type: text/xml"); I don't really
know php, if that's the only header that is sent then you should be OK
as the default encoding for text/xml is iso-8859-1 so as long as your
characters really are in that encoding it should just work...

Yet when I open the XML page in the browser (Safari on Mac Os X) the
accented vowels turn into strange symbols.

If these symbols include accented capital A's that's usually a sign that
the file is in utf8 but is being read as latin1, try manually puting the
browser in utf8 encoding (view/encoding menu in IE)

David
 

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