Question

I discovered an issue with android emulator versions 2.1 and less; specifically, I tested it on the android emulator, versions 1.5, 1.6, and 2.1. I thought that early android versions did not have full or any support for jQuery or ajax, which sounds idiotic to say, but I didn’t realize it was picky about the XML file structure. Each of my XML files start with the following XML declaration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Shift-JIS"?>

Now, Android 2.3.3 and greater and iOS have no issues. Perhaps Android 2.2 may have issues, but I don’t see it available in the SDK Manager for Android.

If I take this XML declaration out of an XML file, these early Android version loads the XML file.

Does not work:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Shift-JIS"?>
<test>Hello World</test>

Works:

<test>Hello World</test>

I tried it using both jQuery.ajax() and XMLHttpRequest and the results above hold.

    $.ajax({type: "GET", "test.xml": url, cache: false, async: false});

The question is why is it that these early versions of android cannot parse the XML structure with the XML declaration? Perhaps, an android 1.5 device can parse it, but I cannot verify that. I can only verify these versions of android emulator have serious issues with XML declarations in an XML file.

I’m hoping there’s a workaround and would appreciate any help.

Thank you.

Answer 1

The XML declaration is not actually needed for valid XML. But it does allow you to define the encoding used in the file. I don’t have access the sources currently but I bet the if you were to change the encoding defined in the declaration to UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 that it will parse the XML just fine. I have been able to parse XML with Android using the UTF-8 encoding.