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<span class="PROGRAMLISTING"><pre><strong class="userinput">... encoding="</strong><var class="replaceable">encoding-name</var><strong class="userinput">" ...</strong></pre></span>
<p>The
encoding declaration, if present,
indicates which character-encoding was used to store the document.
Although all XML documents are ultimately handled as Unicode by the
parser, the external storage scheme may be anything from an ASCII
text file using the Latin-1 character set (ISO-8859-1) to a file with
native Japanese characters.</p>

<p>XML parsers may also recognize other encodings, but the XML
specification only requires that they recognize
UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded documents. Most
parsers also support additional character encodings. For a thorough
discussion of character-encoding schemes, see <link linkend="xmlnut3-CHP-27">Chapter 27</link>.</p>
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