.TH "XML2ASC" "1" "10 Jul 2011" "7.x" "HTML-XML-utils"

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.SH NAME
xml2asc \- convert UTF-8 to &#nnn; entities
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B xml2asc
.SH DESCRIPTION
.LP
Reads an UTF-8 encoded text from standard input and writes to standard
output, converting all non-ASCII characters to &#nnn; entities, so
that the result is ASCII-encoded.
.LP
One example use is to convert ISO-8859-1 to ASCII with &#nnn;
entities, by first running
.B asc2xml
to convert ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and then pipe the result into
.B xml2asc
to convert to ASCII with &#nnn; entities for all accented characters.
.LP
To test if a file is correct UTF-8, ignore the output and test the
exit code, e.g. in Bash:
.d
xml2asc <myfile >/dev/null && echo "OK" || echo "Fail"
.e
.SH "DIAGNOSTICS"
.B xml2asc
returns with a non-zero exit code if the input was not
UTF-8.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR asc2xml (1),
.BR UTF-8 " (RFC 2279)"
.SH BUGS
.LP
Doesn't distinguish mark-up from content, so if the input uses
non-ASCII characters in XML element names, they will be output with
numerical entities in them, which is not legal in XML.