eXeMeL is Erlang library which allows to process XML documents in non-utf8 encodings.
If you get bad_character_code exception when use xmerl
try
xmerl_scan:string(XMLDoc)
catch
exit:{bad_character_code, _, _} ->
oh_no
end.try exemel
xmerl_scan:string(exemel:prepare(XMLDoc)).It will read xml header, determine the encoding and convert it to utf-8 using iconv.
Sample code could be found in exemel/test/xmerl_integration_test.erl.