The following commands are used to modify the default behaviour of the XML parser or XSH itself. Some of the commands are switch between two different modes according to a given expression (which is expected to result either in zero or non-zero value). Other commands also working as a flip-flop have their own explicit counterpart (e.g. verbose and quiet or debug and nodebug). This misconsistency is due to historical reasons.
The encoding and query-encoding options allow to specify character encoding that should be expected from user as well as the encoding to be used by XSH on output. This is particularly useful when you work with UTF-8 encoded documents on a console which supports only 8-bit characters.
The options command displays current settings by means of XSH commands. Thus it can not only be used to review current values, but also to store them future use, e.g. in ~/.xshrc file.