NAME XML::Char - validate characters for XML SYNOPSIS use XML::Char; if (not XML::Char->valid("bell ".chr(7))) { die 'no way to store this string directly to XML'; } use utf8; use XML::Char; if (XML::Char->valid("UTF8 je pořádný peklo")) { print "fuf, we are fine\n"; } DESCRIPTION For me it was kind of a surprised to learn that char(0) is a valid UTF-8 character. All of the 0-0x7F are... Emo: well it's not because that they are valid utf-8 characters that you have to expect XML to accept them Well of course not, now I know :-) http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charsets defines which characters XML processors MUST accept: [2] Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF] /* any Unicode character, excluding the surrogate blocks, FFFE, and FFFF. */ This module validates if a given string meets this criteria. In addition the string has to be a Perl UTF-8 string (is_utf8_string() - see "Unicode-Support" in perlapi). valid($value) Returns true or false if $value consists of valid UTF-8 XML characters. LINKS How can I strip invalid XML characters from strings in Perl? Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 AUTHOR Jozef Kutej Aristotle Pagaltzis - completely rewrote the initial Char.XS to handle the SvUTF8 flag COPYRIGHT Copyright 2009 Jozef Kutej, all rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.