EpubCCEPUBCheck RSC-028: XML file not in UTF-8
Updated:
EPUBCheck RSC-028 is an error message: “XML documents must be encoded in UTF-8, but … was detected.” An XML file uses an encoding other than UTF-8, which EPUB requires for XML documents. Characters such as accents and quotes can show as garbage in reading apps.
The official message
XML documents must be encoded in UTF-8, but %1$s was detected.
- Default severity
- Error. The EPUB breaks a rule of the specification and is invalid. Stores and Send to Kindle may reject it, and EPUBCheck exits with status 1.
- EPUBCheck version
- 5.4.0
%1$s, %2$s… are filled in with the file, value or element EPUBCheck found.
Typical causes
- A file saved as ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 or another legacy encoding, often declared in its XML declaration.
- Text pasted from another document and saved with the editor's default encoding.
How to fix it
- Open the file named in the message in an editor that can change encodings.
- Convert the file to UTF-8 and change the XML declaration to encoding="UTF-8" (or remove the encoding attribute).
- Check accented characters after converting, then validate again.
When it's not this
UTF-16 is only a warning, RSC-027.
Terms used here
Other RSC messages
RSC-027XML document is encoded in UTF-16. It should be encoded in UTF-8 instead.RSC-029Data URL is not allowed in this context.RSC-026URL "…" leaks outside the container (it is not a valid-relative-ocf-URL-with-fragment string)RSC-030File URLs are not allowed in EPUB, but found "…".RSC-025Informative parsing error: …RSC-031Remote resource references should use HTTPS, but found "…".
Sources
Message text and severity from EPUBCheck 5.4.0 (W3C, BSD-3-Clause). Explanation by EpubCC.