XML Reference: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration > Overview of Support for XML in Siebel Business Applications >

Special Characters in XML Documents

Special characters should be represented in accordance with XML standards for those characters in order for them to be correctly interpreted within Siebel Business Applications. Also, specify the character set you are using if it is not UTF-8 (the default).

NOTE:  To edit an XML document including binary or encoded data, use editors such as Microsoft Notepad or Word that do not convert the data upon saving the file.

Special (Escape) Characters

The EAI XML Converter can handle special characters for inbound and outbound XML, as shown in Table 2. Non-Siebel XML should already handle special characters before integrating into the Siebel application. Special characters are indicated by enclosing the text for the character between an ampersand (&) and a semicolon (;). Also, if the XML is passed in a URL, then URL encoding of special characters is required as shown in Table 2.

Declaring the Character Set in Use

You must include the following parameter in the XML version declaration of your XML, XSD, or DTD document to declare the character set in use, if it is not the default of UTF-8:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>

Supported character sets include but are not limited to ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 (Big or Small Endian), UCS4 (Big or Small Endian), EBCDIC code pages IBM037 and IBM1140 encodings, ISO-8859-1, and Windows-1252. This means that the XML parser can parse input XML files in these encodings.

The following encodings can be used in the XML declaration:

• US-ASCII
• UTF-8
• ISO-10646-UCS-4
• ebcdic-cp-us
• ibm1140
• ISO-8859-1
• windows-1252

The character set declaration encoding must appear after the version declaration. For example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>

The output can be in one of the following XML encodings:

• UTF-8
• UTF-16
• Local Code Page