Re: [boost] [serialization] Why can't hyphens appear in NVP's?

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-07-18 11:48:11

Jonathan Wakely wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 08:11:31AM -0700, Robert Ramey wrote:
>
>> Hmm, I've twiddled with the set of allowable characters from time to
>> time on sort of an ad hoc basis.  For some reason it never occured
>> to me to actually try and find the difinitive source for this.  So I
>> suppose there are couple
>
> Assuming you're referring to XML, it's here:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
>
>> of pending fine points here:
>>
>> a) the exact rules for what characters are legal in which part of
>> tag names. This might not be all that obvious given that the html
>> can be coded in wide characters then to utf-8.  Also the narrow
>> character version is coded with the current locale so that's another
>> story.
>
> A character is a character,  how it is encoded is irrelevent.

Thanks for the link.

That's not obvious to me - especially when one is using a locale specific
character set.  Maybe XML requires that that all characters be ucs-16 (or
32) or some such thing but as a practical matter lots of people are still
using locale-specific types for strings.  So its not obvious what the
implications are of including a '\0' as part of text string in and xml
archive.  This is one of those things that seemed simple when I started but
ran into a lot of small "gotchas' as time when on.

>
> Re-encoding an XML file doesn't change whether it is well-formed or
> not (assuming you update any encoding specifiers in the document
> itself.)
>
> So if 'a' is allowed in an element name then the representation of 'a'
> in the document's encoding is allowed in an element name, whatever
> that encoding is.
>
> jon
>
>
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