Unable to set 'encoding' in XML prolog

Question

Hi, we're trying to set 'encoding' in an XML prolog with the following code in an 11.2 environment: -
SQL> set serverout on size 1000000
SQL> declare
2 l_domnode dbms_xmldom.domnode;
3 l_domdoc dbms_xmldom.domdocument;
4 begin
5 l_domdoc := dbms_xmldom.newdomdocument;
6 l_domnode := dbms_xmldom.makenode( l_domdoc );
7 dbms_xmldom.setversion( l_domdoc, '1.0' );
8 dbms_xmldom.setcharset( l_domdoc, 'UTF-8' );
9 dbms_output.put_line ( dbms_xmldom.getxmltype ( l_domdoc ).getstringval(
10 end;
11 /
<?xml version="1.0"?>
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
what happened to the 'encoding' ?
thx,

Answer 1

Encoding iis a function of serialization....
So
#1. Don't use legacy methods (.getStringVal(), getClobVal()) to serialize in 11.x enviroment. Use XMLSerialize() instead.
#2 XML Will be serialized in the client character set when displayed via SQL*PLUS. Oralce always encodes data into the character set requested by the client when dealing with Character date, so the actual value for the serialized XML and the value in the encoding could be different.
#3. The onyl way to requestt a speciifc characeter set is to get a BLOB (Binary Large Object) based serialization of the XML. This is only possible when using a 'C' or Java API to access the serialized content. When requesting a BLOB based serialization XMLSerialze supports an ENCOIDING option, which allows you to request a specific encoding and which will add the requested encoding to the XML declaration.
See many other posts on this subject..