Editing XML (section)

=== Encoding detection ===
The Unicode character set can be encoded into [[byte]]s for storage or transmission in a variety of different ways, called "encodings". Unicode itself defines encodings that cover the entire repertoire; well-known ones include [[UTF-8]] (which the XML standard recommends using, without a [[byte order mark|BOM]]) and [[UTF-16]].<ref>{{cite web|last=Bray|first=T.|url=http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/26/UTF|title=Characters vs. Bytes|website=Tbray.org |date=April 26, 2003 |access-date=16 November 2017}}</ref> There are many other text encodings that predate Unicode, such as [[ASCII]] and various [[ISO/IEC 8859]]; their character repertoires are in every case subsets of the Unicode character set.

XML allows the use of any of the Unicode-defined encodings and any other encodings whose characters also appear in Unicode. XML also provides a mechanism whereby an XML processor can reliably, without any prior knowledge, determine which encoding is being used.{{sfnp|Bray|Paoli|Sperberg-McQueen|Maler|2008|loc=appendix F}} Encodings other than UTF-8 and UTF-16 are not necessarily recognized by every XML parser (and in some cases not even UTF-16, even though the standard mandates it to also be recognized).