Character Encoding

This section describes the character encoding mechanisms for HTTP requests to Tamino and responses from Tamino.

The term "encoding" in this section is used with the semantic defined in the W3C XML specification at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/. The terms "charset" and "character set" are used with the semantic defined in the HTTP/1.1 description at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.


Character Encoding of Input Documents

Input documents can be supplied for X-Machine commands such as _process and _define. The encoding of an input document can be specified explicitly in several ways:

  • in the encoding attribute of the document's XML declaration

  • in the _encoding parameter passed in the X-Machine command

  • in the charset value that is defined in conjunction with the document's Content-Type parameter in the HTTP request

If the encoding is not specified in one of these ways, the document is assumed to be encoded according to the value of the server XML parameter XML document default encoding (for details see the list of server XML properties in the section Database Properties in the documentation for the Tamino Manager).

All input documents with top-level media type "text" are converted to Unicode. Input data is converted from the client's encoding to Unicode. The original encoding of the input is not remembered. X-Machine uses the internet standards for character set names as defined in the document http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets.

Hint for users of Microsoft Windows: Please note that Microsoft code page 1252 is close to but not identical with ISO-8859-1 (latin1).

Example

Database queries specifying character encoding can be sent to the X-Machine using the X-Machine command _encoding followed for example by the X-Machine command _xql in a single HTTP request, for example

http://myhost:80/tamino/mydb/mycollection?_encoding=utf-8&_xql=patient/name[surname="Bloggs"].

The value of the _encoding parameter will be applied to the values of all commands that are subsequently executed. See also the section Order of Execution of Commands.

Character Encoding of Output Documents

Output documents are converted by the X-Machine to the encoding desired by the client. Character references are used to represent characters that do not exist in the desired encoding. The desired encoding of the output can be specified in the HTTP header "Accept-Charset". If "Accept-Charset" is omitted, X-Machine uses the encoding of the client request.

Supported Character Encodings

The Tamino server supports all standard character encodings and their well known aliases, as shown in the following list.

Note:
It is possible that some Tamino product components do not support some of these encodings. Please see the documentation for the individual developer components for a list of their supported encodings.

Encoding Name Well known aliases
Adobe-Standard-Encoding csAdobeStandardEncoding
Big5 950, cp950, csBig5, ibm-1370_VSUB_VPUA, x-big5
CESU-8  
cp850 850, csPC850Multilingual, IBM850
cp851 851, csPC851, IBM851
cp856 856, ibm-856
cp857 857, csIBM857
cp858 IBM00858
cp859  
cp860 860, csIBM860, IBM860
cp861 861, cp-is, csIBM861, IBM861
cp862 862, cp867, cspc862latinhebrew
cp863 cp863, csIBM863, IBM863
cp864 csIBM864
cp865 865, csIBM865, IBM865
cp866 866, csIBM866
cp868 868, cp-ar, csIBM868, IBM868
cp869 869, cp-gr, csIBM869
cp921 921
cp922 922
EUC-JP csEUCPkdFmtJapanese, eucjis, Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese, ibm-33722_VPUA, ibm-eucJP, X-EUC-JP
EUC-KR csEUCKR, ibm-970_VPUA, ibm-eucKR, X-EUC-KR
gb18030 ibm-1392
GB2312 1383, chinese, cp1383, csGB2312, csISO58GB231280, EUC-CN, gb, gb2312-1980, GB_2312-80, ibm-1383, ibm-1383_VPUA, ibm-eucCN, iso-ir-58, X-EUC-CN
GBK CP936, ibm-1386_VSUB_VPUA, MS936, zh_cn, windows-936
hp-roman8 csHPRoman8, r8, roman8
HZ-GB-2312 HZ
IBM01140 CCSID01140, CP01140, cpibm1140, ebcdic-us-37+euro
IBM01141 CCSID01141, CP01141, cpibm1141, ebcdic-de-273+euro
IBM01142 CCSID01142, CP01142, cpibm1142, ebcdic-dk-277+euro, ebcdic-no-277+euro
IBM01143 CCSID01143, CP01143, cpibm1143, ebcdic-fi-278+euro, ebcdic-se-278+euro
IBM01144 CCSID01144, CP01144, cpibm1144, ebcdic-it-280+euro
IBM01145 CCSID01145, CP01145, cpibm1145, ebcdic-es-284+euro
IBM01146 CCSID01146, CP01146, cpibm1146, ebcdic-gb-285+euro
IBM01147 CCSID01147, CP01147, cpibm1147, ebcdic-fr-297+euro
IBM01148 CCSID01148, CP01148, cpibm1148, ebcdic-international-500+euro
IBM01149 CCSID01149, CP01149, cpibm1149, ebcdic-is-871+euro
IBM037 cpibm37, ebcdic-cp-us, ebcdic-cp-ca, ebcdic-cp-wt, ebcdic-cp-nl, cp37, cp037, 037
IBM1026 CP1026, csIBM1026, Ibm-1026_STD
IBM273 273, CP273, cpibm273, csIBM273, ebcdic-de
IBM277 277, csIBM277, cpibm277, EBCDIC-CP-DK, EBCDIC-CP-NO, ebcdic-dk
IBM278 278, cp278, cpibm278, csIBM278, ebcdic-cp-fi, ebcdic-cp-se, ebcdic-sv
IBM280 280, CP280, cpibm280, csIBM280, ebcdic-cp-it
IBM284 284, CP284, cpibm284, csIBM284, ebcdic-cp-es
IBM285 285, CP285, cpibm285, csIBM285, ebcdic-cp-gb, ebcdic-gb
IBM290 cp290, csIBM290, EBCDIC-JP-kana
IBM297 297, cp297, cpibm297, csIBM297, ebcdic-cp-fr
IBM367  
IBM420 420, cp420, csIBM420, ebcdic-cp-ar1
IBM424 424, cp424, csIBM424, ebcdic-cp-he
IBM500 500, CP500, cpibm500, csIBM500, ebcdic-cp-be, ebcdic-cp-ch
IBM852  
IBM855  
IBM857  
IBM862  
IBM864  
IBM869  
IBM870 CP870, csIBM870, ibm-870, ibm-870_STD, ebcdic-cp-roece, ebcdic-cp-yu
IBM871 871, CP871, cpibm871, csIBM871, ebcdic-cp-is, ebcdic-is
IBM918 CP918, csIBM918, , ebcdic-cp-ar2, ibm-918_STD, ibm-918_VPUA
ISO-2022-CN-EXT  
ISO-2022-CN  
ISO-2022-JP-2 csISO2022JP2
ISO-2022-JP csISO2022JP
ISO-2022-KR csISO2022KR
ISO-2022 2022, cp2022
iso-8859-15  
ISO-8859-1 8859-1, cp819, csISOLatin1, IBM819, ISO_8859-1:1987, iso-ir-100, l1, latin1
iso-8859-2 8859-2, 912, cp912, csISOLatin2, ISO_8859-2:1987, iso-ir-101, l2, latin2
iso-8859-3 8859-3, 913, cp913, csISOLatin3, iso-ir-109, l3, latin3
iso-8859-4 8859-4, 914, cp914, csISOLatin4, ISO_8859-4:1988, iso-ir-110, l4, latin4
iso-8859-5 8859-5, 915, cp915, csISOLatinCyrillic, cyrillic, ISO_8859-5:1988, iso-ir-144
iso-8859-6 1089, 8859-6, arabic, asmo-708, cp1089, csISOLatinArabic, ecma-114, ISO_8859-6:1987, iso-ir-127
iso-8859-7 813, 8859-7, cp813, csISOLatinGreek, ecma-118, elot_928, greek, greek8, ISO_8859-7:1987, iso-ir-126
iso-8859-8 916, cp916, csISOLatinHebrew, Hebrew, 8859-8, ISO_8859-8:1988, iso-ir-138
iso-8859-9 8859-9, 920, cp920, latin5, csISOLatin5, ISO_8859-9:1989, iso-ir-148, l5
JIS_Encoding ISO-2022-JP-1, JIS
KOI8-R cp878, cskoi8r, koi8
KSC_5601 949, csKSC56011987, ibm949, ibm949_VSUB_VPUA, iso-ir-149, johab, Korean, ksc5601_1992, KS_C_5601-1987, KS_C_5601-1989, ks_x_1001:1992
mac csMacintosh
SCSU  
Shift_JIS 943, cp943, cp932, csShiftJIS, csWindows31J, MS_Kanji, pck, sjis, windows-31j, x-sjis
TIS-620 874, cp874, cp9066, ms874, windows-874
US-ASCII ANSI_X3.4-1968, ASCII, ANSI_X3.4-1986, cp367, csASCII, ISO_646.irv:1983, ISO_646.irv:1991, ISO646-US, iso-ir-6, us
UTF-16BE cp1201, UTF16_BigEndian, x-utf-16be
UTF-16LE cp1200, UTF16_LittleEndian, x-utf-16le
UTF-32BE UTF32_BigEndian
UTF-32LE UTF32_LittleEndian
UTF-7 cp65000
UTF-8 cp1208, cp65001
UTF-16 csUnicode, ISO-10646-UCS-2, ucs-2
UTF-32 csUCS4, ISO-10646-UCS-4, ucs-4
windows-1250 cp1250
windows-1251 cp1251
windows-1252 cp1252
windows-1253 cp1253
windows-1254 cp1254
windows-1255 cp1255
windows-1256 cp1256
windows-1257 cp1257
windows-1258 cp1258