Here are some of the new features in Xerces-J:

• Additional support for W3C XML Schema Language.
• DOS filenames no longer work. See Common Problems section of the FAQ.

You can turn validation on and off via methods available on the SAX2 XMLFilter interface. While only the SAXParser implements the XMLFilter interface, the methods required for turning on validation are available to both parser classes, DOM and SAX.
The code snippet below shows how to turn validation on -- assume that parser is an instance of either org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser or org.apache.xerces.parsers.DOMParser.

parser.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/validation", true);

• UTF-8
• UTF-16 Big Endian, UTF-16 Little Endian
• IBM-1208
• ISO Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
• ISO Latin-2 (ISO-8859-2) [Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian (in Latin transcription), Serbocroatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Upper and Lower Sorbian]
• ISO Latin-3 (ISO-8859-3) [Maltese, Esperanto]
• ISO Latin-4 (ISO-8859-4)
• ISO Latin Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5)
• ISO Latin Arabic (ISO-8859-6)
• ISO Latin Greek (ISO-8859-7)
• ISO Latin Hebrew (ISO-8859-8)
• ISO Latin-5 (ISO-8859-9) [Turkish]
• Extended Unix Code, packed for Japanese (euc-jp, eucjis)
• Japanese Shift JIS (shift-jis)
• Chinese (big5)
• Chinese for PRC (mixed 1/2 byte) (gb2312)
• Japanese ISO-2022-JP (iso-2022-jp)
• Cyrllic (koi8-r)
• Extended Unix Code, packed for Korean (euc-kr)
• Russian Unix, Cyrillic (koi8-r)
• Windows Thai (cp874)
• Latin 1 Windows (cp1252)
• cp858
• EBCDIC encodings:
• EBCDIC US (ebcdic-cp-us)
• EBCDIC Canada (ebcdic-cp-ca)
• EBCDIC Netherland (ebcdic-cp-nl)
• EBCDIC Denmark (ebcdic-cp-dk)
• EBCDIC Norway (ebcdic-cp-no)
• EBCDIC Finland (ebcdic-cp-fi)
• EBCDIC Sweden (ebcdic-cp-se)
• EBCDIC Italy (ebcdic-cp-it)
• EBCDIC Spain, Latin America (ebcdic-cp-es)
• EBCDIC Great Britain (ebcdic-cp-gb)
• EBCDIC France (ebcdic-cp-fr)
• EBCDIC Hebrew (ebcdic-cp-he)
• EBCDIC Switzerland (ebcdic-cp-ch)
• EBCDIC Roece (ebcdic-cp-roece)
• EBCDIC Yugoslavia (ebcdic-cp-yu)
• EBCDIC Iceland (ebcdic-cp-is)
• EBCDIC Urdu (ebcdic-cp-ar2)
• Latin 0 EBCDIC
• EBCDIC Arabic (ebcdic-cp-ar1)