title: Is the XML declaration tag case sensitive?
body: <p>I have what is probably a really simple, studid question but I can't find an answer to it anywhere and I need to be pretty sure about this.</p>
  
  <p>I have various XML files from various vendors. One of the vendors provide me an XML file with japanese characters in the file. Originally, I was having trouble processing the XML file (I'm using the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms760399(VS.85).aspx" rel="noreferrer">MSXML SDK</a>). The characters would come out wrong. I found that if the following was added to the XML file everything worked great.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And so I asked the vendor to add this to their file. But they added it with the encoding in lower case:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And when I load this new file, with this declaration, I'm getting the same problem as when this declaration was not there. </p>
  
  <p>What I'm trying to figure out (for sure) is if that encoding attribute is case sensitive (or is otherwise the problem). <strong>Does it matter that they put "utf-16" versus "UTF-16"?</strong> </p>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong>: Under the advise of these who posted answers here, I setup and executed a test. One file had the lower case utf-16 and the other upper case. Other than that, the files were identical. <strong>This did not fix the problem</strong> and is not the problem. My conclusion is that MSXML is not case sensitive as the spec, posted in the answers, states.</p>