Encoding Preferences

Oxygen XML Developer lets you configure how character encodings are recognized when opening files and which encodings are used when saving files. To configure encoding options, open the Preferences dialog box and go to Encoding. The following encoding options are available:

• Fallback character encoding - Default character encoding of non-XML documents if their character encoding cannot be determined from other sources (like, for example, specified in the document itself, or determined by the file type).
  Note: For certain document types, the following encoding detection rules are used:

  • For XML, DTD and CSS documents, Oxygen XML Developer tries to collect the character encoding from the document. If no such encoding is found, then UTF-8 is used.
  • For JavaScript, JSON, SQL, XQuery, and RNC, the UTF-8 encoding is used.
• UTF-8 BOM handling - This setting specifies how to handle the Byte Order Mark (BOM) when Oxygen XML Developer saves a UTF-8 XML document:
  • Don't Write - do not save the BOM bytes. Loaded BOM bytes are ignored.
  • Write - save the BOM bytes.
  • Keep - do not alter the BOM declaration of the currently open file. This is the default option.
  Note: The UTF-16 BOM is always preserved. UTF-32 documents have a big-endian byte order.
• Encoding errors handling - This setting specifies how to handle characters that cannot be represented in the character encoding that is used when the document is opened. The available options are:
  • REPORT - displays an error identifying the character that cannot be represented in the specified encoding. Unrecognized characters are rendered as an empty box. This is the default option.
  • IGNORE - the error is ignored and the character is not included in the document displayed in the editor.
    Attention: If you edit and save the document, the characters that cannot be represented in the specified encoding are dropped.
  • REPLACE - the character is replaced with a standard replacement character. For example, if the encoding is UTF-8, the replacement character has the Unicode code FFFD, and if the encoding is ASCII, the replacement character code is 63.