Alan Searle wrote:

> For reporting purposes I generate XML from an MS-Access 2002 database
> and find that in this way I can format and display the data no problem
> with a XSL/HTML template.  Perfect!
> 
> However, then I found that I needed to replace my automatic MS-Access
> output with a customised dump of the XML and find that I am now having
> a problem with special characters (umlauts).
> 
> For my tests I have built two identical extracts one generated by
> MS-Access and the other constructed by me using VBA.  Here I find that
> my (VBA generated) version produces an error message 'illegal
> characters' (stopping at the point where umlauts: ä and ü are found)
> in the browser while the MS-Access generated version still displays.
> 
> It can't be anthing in the content because both files are identical so
> I am wondering whether I need to make any specific declarations when I
> open the text file in VBA?  Are there any hidden commands which
> indicate which characterset the file will contain?
> 
> Any tips or links on the issue of handling special characters in XML
> would be a great help.

The default character encoding in XML is UTF-8, so unless one or other 
of your sample files specifies something else, your XML processor will
assume UTF-8, and therefore the file that fails must be using some other
encoding. For most western European languages, ISO-8859-1 is sufficient,
so try prefixing the VBA file with an XML Declaration saying so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

///Peter
-- 
XML FAQ: http://xml.silmaril.ie/