[jdom-interest] What does the encoding really mean?

[Fred Clewis]

I'm using JDOM beta7 and xerces 2 beta3.  I have a question about the XML
decl encoding attribute and when it should be altered.

Suppose you have a UTF-8 (with multibyte encodings) XML file and parse it
in to build a document and then output it to a unicode string in Java that
perhaps you use MQSeries to send somewhere.   In the MQSeries transport it
is described as CCSID 1200, unicode, and it is stored as twobyte unicode.
The xml data still says encoding="UTF-8".  Well, at that moment in memory,
that is untrue.   Is that OK?  Does the original encoding from file,
"UTF-8", need to be preserved like this for some subsequent purpose?   Does
it need to be changed to "UCS-2"?

thanks for any ideas,