[AXIS-2342] Reopen issue: Character entities are escaped too aggressively

• Type: Bug
• Status: Open
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 1.0
• Component/s: Serialization/Deserialization
• Environment: Operating System: All; Platform: All
• Bugzilla Id: 19327
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Thiago Jung Bauermann
• Created: 16/Dec/05 01:41
• Updated: 17/May/12 20:58

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.

Issue Links

• is a clone of: AXIS-840 Character entities are escaped too aggressively