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.. xml2asc - convert UTF-8 to &#nnn; entities xml2asc

Reads an UTF-8 encoded text from standard input and writes to standard output, converting all non-ASCII characters to &#nnn; entities, so that the result is ASCII-encoded.

One example use is to convert ISO-8859-1 to ASCII with &#nnn; entities, by first running asc2xml to convert ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and then pipe the result into xml2asc to convert to ASCII with &#nnn; entities for all accented characters.

To test if a file is correct UTF-8, ignore the output and test the exit code, e.g. in Bash: .d xml2asc <myfile >/dev/null && echo "OK" || echo "Fail" .e

xml2asc returns with a non-zero exit code if the input was not UTF-8. asc2xml (1), UTF-8 " (RFC 2279)"

Doesn't distinguish mark-up from content, so if the input uses non-ASCII characters in XML element names, they will be output with numerical entities in them, which is not legal in XML.