Reopen issue: Character entities are escaped too aggressively

• Key: AXIS-2342
• Type: Bug
• Status: Open
• Assignee: Axis Developers Mailing List
• Reporter: Thiago Jung Bauermann
• Component/s: Serialization/Deserialization
• Affects Version/s: 1.0

Environment

Operating System: All
Platform: All

Description

We are using SOAP to send XML documents from client to server and back. The
documents contain a lot of non-ASCII data. This is encoded as UTF-8 by us.
However, when retrieved from an Axis server, Axis will escape almost all of our
characters into character entities (so &#...;) This means messages become about
three times as big as they have to for 'international' documents, which for us
is a large performance problem. I narrowed down the problem to
  XMLUtils::xmlEncodeString
that has the code:
                if (((int)chars[i]) > 127) {
                        strBuf.append("&#");
                        strBuf.append((int)chars[i]);
                        strBuf.append(";");
This seems unnecessary to me, as Axis will send all messages in UTF-8 anyway,
for which no encoding is necessary (and should encoding be configurable, I feel
this should be escaped elsewhere).

Is there any reason for this code, I commented it out and it seemed to have no
adverse effect on our application (apart from reduced network traffic)?

Tested with 1.0, also looked up in the sources of 1.1-rc2.