On Aug 29, 2013, at 11:57 AM, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote: > > One way is to write the core code of std.xml in such a way that it > handles all data as ubyte[] (or ushort[]/uint[] for 16-bit/32-bit > encodings) so that it's encoding-independent. Then on top of this core, > write some convenience wrappers that casts/converts to string, wstring, > dstring. As an initial stab, we could support only UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 > if the user asks for string/wstring/dstring, and leave XML in other > encodings up to the user to decode manually. This way, at least the user > can get the data out of the file. > > Later on, once we've gotten our act together with std.encoding, we can > hook it up to std.xml to provide autoconversion.
As long autoconversion is optional. When parsing XML or JSON or whatever, I generally only care about specific strings, and sometimes don't want anything decoded at all. Having decoding done automatically before the event fires is a huge and potentially unnecessary performance hit. Not doing this decoding automatically is what makes the Tango XML parser so fast.
