use Perl

Ever solve a problem that was so painful you just blocked it out of your memory? :-)

I had one of those moments today. One of my co$workers was having problems with an XML file on win32 that he was getting from an HP system. Then the painful memories kicked in, and once I revisited the solution I had 2 years ago, I can't believe I ever figured it out [with the help of some Googlers as well].

The issue then was that the web took in latin encoded posts, and we were sending that buffer over the network to a main system that lived and breathed HPRoman8. Whilst in .NET 1.1, there was no native way to convert, so I worked together a character map of utf->hproman8 and an Encoding class for .NET so I could map data on the way out.

All because of some people with diacritic marks in their names. :-)

Now that I know WHY the XML file is broken, hopefully we can convince MSXML to do our bidding.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. There are three things that O loathe in this world of programming: codepages/encodings, time/zone conversions, and USPS/ISO country code issues.