The first line of an XML file should begin with this declaration:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

An XML file with this declaration is assumed to use UTF-8 encoding for escaped Unicode characters. You can specify another character encoding with a declaration of this form:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="encoding-name" ?>

encoding-name is the name of a supported XML encoding—for example, ISO-8859-1 or SHIFT_JIS. For a list of the XML encodings supported by the Oracle ATG Web Commerce XML parser, go to http://xml.apache.org/xerces-j/faq-general.html.

Note: If you combine files with different encodings, the combined XML file (which exists only as a temporary file) uses a common encoding of UTF-8.