Hi Kendall,

    Thanks for taking the time to respond.

    As usual, I did not do a good job of asking the question.

    The cut-n-paste I put in the original was from a display that had 'hex on' option, so you get three lines displayed for each original line in the file.
    With it set to 'hex off', the display is

    Ú.<?xml encoding="UTF-16" ?>

    With it set to 'hex on', the display is

    Ú.<?xml encoding="UTF-16" ?>
FF46A9948989889877EEC6FF7466
EFCF743055364957EF436016F0FE

    The 2nd and third lines in this cut-n-paste are the hex values for the 1st line.

    I will put the version= in the code and try again, as well as looking at the link you sent.

    Thank you.

    -- Dave

On 10/2/2017 4:52 PM, Kendall Shaw wrote:

Hi,

If the pasted text is what you see in a text editor, then the text is
  probably not valid UTF-16. It would look like this in the text display for hex viewer:

…<.?.x.m.l..e.n.c.o.  etc. A space-like character before each displayed 8 bit character.

Aside from that the XML declaration requires version=”…”, so <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-16”?>

And this is not valid markup

FF46A9948989889877EEC6FF7466
EFCF743055364957EF436016F0FE

You might want to look at https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#NT-XMLDecl

And if you have software to encode your data as UTF-16BE that might be easier than trying to construct UTF-16 out of bytes, if that is what is shown.

Kendall

On 10/2/17, 2:24 PM, "basex-talk-bounces@mailman.uni-konstanz.de on behalf of Dave Day" <basex-talk-bounces@mailman.uni-konstanz.de on behalf of David.Day@duke-software.com> wrote:

     Hello list.
          Another newbie question.  I am creating a file in UTF-16, Big-endian.  I
     am putting a 2 byte BOM sequence of x'FEFF' as the 1st two bytes,
     followed by a prolog statement identifying this as UTF-16 code.
          I then ftp this file to my desktop in binary to maintain the encoding.
          Below is a cut-n-paste of the 1st few bytes as it looks on the mainframe
     box.
            ---------------------------
     Ú.<?xml encoding="UTF-16" ?>
     FF46A9948989889877EEC6FF7466
     EFCF743055364957EF436016F0FE
          The way the display is within ISPF, each byte has one character on two
     lines, so the 1st byte, FE should be read as col 1 of both lines, and so
     forth.
          When I try to create a new database I get the following from Basex.
          Command:
     CREATE DB d100217 :zxpf.ftp.download/apf1.v2r3.xmldata
     Error:
     "d100217.xml" (Line 1): Content is not allowed in prolog.
               Help greatly appreciated.
          Regards,
               Dave Day