On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 11:38:02AM +0100, Ralph Cleminson wrote:
> >
> > dare one ask *why* you want to this transform? what do you gain?
> Because if I have the former in my XML document, the browser
> displays a row of question marks, whereas if I have the latter, it
> displays nice cyrillic.

Two possibilities:

 * you are using a bad browser.
 * you have not declared the encoding type in the head of the document

I'd suggest checking the latter, and then seeing which browsers
still break. Obviously, if its Netscape 4, then you should simply
throw it away on the junk heap where it belongs :-}

> It does now, but I'm sure it was Unicode when I entered it.  Perhaps
> I'm missing something (I don't have any background in
> programming, remember), but I thought that if you typed something
> in a Unicode font on a Unicode-compliant operating system, the
> machine would save it as Unicode.  Or am I just being naive?

slightly, because "Unicode" covers a multitude of sins. You can
encode it in many ways. Your OS may know about Unicode, but that
does not mean it save text by default in an encoding like UTF-8.
If its Windows, it likely saves by default in some horrid Windows
encoding. But geez, what do I know, I dont use Windows :-}

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Sebastian Rahtz      OUCS Information Manager
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431