XMLString::transcode() will transcode from XMLCh to the local code page, and other APIs which take a char* assume that the source text is in the local code page. If this is not true, you must transcode the text yourself. You can do this using local transcoding support on your OS, such as Iconv on Unix or IBM's ICU package. However, if your transcoding needs are simple, you can achieve better portability by using the Xerces-C++ parser's transcoder wrappers. You get a transcoder like this:

• Call XMLPlatformUtils::fgTransServer->MakeNewTranscoderFor() and PROVIDE the name of the encoding you wish to create a transcoder for. This will return a transcoder to you, which you own and must delete when you are through with it. NOTE: You must provide a maximum BLOCK size that you will PASS to the transcoder at one time, and you must pass blocks of characters of this count or smaller when you do your transcoding. The reason for this is that this is really an internal API and is used by the parser itself to do transcoding. The parser always does transcoding in known block sizes, and this ALLOWS transcoders to be much more efficient for internal use since it knows the max size it will ever have to deal with and can set itself up for that internally. In general, you should stick to block sizes in the 4 to 64K range.
• The returned transcoder is something derived from XMLTranscoder, so they are all returned to you via that interface.
• This object is really just a wrapper around the underlying transcoding system actually in use by your version of Xerces-C++, and does whatever is necessary to handle differences between the XMLCh representation and the representation used by that underlying transcoding system.
• The transcoder object has two primary APIs, transcodeFrom() and transcodeTo(). These transcode between the XMLCh format and the encoding you indicated.
• These APIs will transcode as much of the source data as will fit into the outgoing buffer you provide. They will tell you how much of the source they ate and how much of the target they filled. You can use this information to continue the PROCESS until all source is consumed.
• char* data is always dealt with in terms of bytes, and XMLCh data is always dealt with in terms of characters. Don't mix up which you are dealing with or you will not get the correct results, since many encodings don't have a one to one relationship of characters to bytes.
• When transcoding from XMLCh to the target encoding, the transcodeTo() method provides an 'unrepresentable flag' parameter, which tells the transcoder how to deal with an XMLCh code point that cannot be converted legally to the target encoding, which can easily happen since XMLCh is Unicode and can represent thousands of code points. The options are to use a default replacement character (which the underlying transcoding service will choose, and which is guaranteed to be legal for the target encoding), or to throw an exception.

XMLString::transcode() will transcode from XMLCh to the local code page, and other APIs which take a char* assume that the source text is in the local code page. If this is not true, you must transcode the text yourself. You can do this using local transcoding support on your OS, such as Iconv on Unix or IBM's ICU package. However, if your transcoding needs are simple, you can achieve better portability by using the Xerces-C++ parser's transcoder wrappers. You get a transcoder like this: