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## Package net.sf.saxon.serialize.charcode

This package provides classes for handling different character sets, especially when serializing the output of a query or transformation.

See:
Description

Interface Summary
CharacterSet | This interface defines properties of a character set, built in to the Saxon product.

Class Summary
ASCIICharacterSet | This class defines properties of the US-ASCII character set
CharacterSetFactory | This class delivers a CharacterSet object for a given named encoding.
ISO88591CharacterSet | This class defines properties of the ISO-8859-1 character set
JavaCharacterSet | This class establishes properties of a character set that is known to the Java VM but not specifically known to Saxon.
UTF16CharacterSet | A class to hold some static constants and methods associated with processing UTF16 and surrogate pairs
UTF8CharacterSet | This class defines properties of the UTF-8 character set
XMLCharacterData | This module contains data regarding the classification of characters in XML 1.0 and XML 1.1, and a number of interrogative methods to support queries on this data.

## Package net.sf.saxon.serialize.charcode Description

This package provides classes for handling different character sets, especially when serializing the output of a query or transformation.

Most of the classes in this package are implementations of the interface `CharacterSet`. The sole function of these classes is to determine whether a particular character is present in the character set or not: if not, Saxon has to replace it with a character reference.

The actual translation of Unicode characters to characters in the selected encoding is left to the Java run-time library. (Note that different versions of Java support different sets of encodings, and there is no easy way to find out which encodings are supported in a given installation).

It is possible to configure Saxon to support additional character sets by writing an implementation of the `CharacterSet` interface, and registering this class with the `Configuration` using the call `getCharaterSetFactory().setCharacterSetImplementation()`

If an output encoding is requested that Saxon does not recognize, but which the Java platform does recognize, then Saxon attempts to determine which characters the encoding can represent, so that unsupported characters can be written as numeric character references. Saxon wraps the Java `CharSet` object in a `JavaCharacterSet` object, and tests whether a character is encodable by calling the Java interrogative `encoding.canEncode()`, caching the result locally. Since this mechanism appears to have become reliable in JDK 1.5, it is now used much more widely than before, and most character sets are now supported in Saxon by relying on this mechanism.

Michael H. Kay
Saxonica Limited
9 June 2009

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