Subj : not all is lost but far too much for far too long To : Ozz Nixon From : mark lewis Date : Sat Jun 29 2019 01:25 am On 2019 Jun 28 21:23:36, you wrote to Maurice Kinal: ON> FTN Header versus actual message body conveying Unicode. ON> When I telnet to a SQL server that speaks Unicode only, it always ON> returns the following characters (pascal): #239#187#191 that's a UTF8 BOM (Byte Order Mark)... ON> When I telnet to a web page that speaks Unicode, it too returns ON> #239#187#191 plus the etc. i'm sure you know what it is but if not, it is a magic number that may appear at the start of a text stream... it signals at least one of several things to program processing the stream... 1. the byte order, or endianness, of the stream 2. that the text stream's encoding is unicode 3. which nnicode encoding the stream is using ON> So... would it not stand true that systems that are posting UTF8 do ON> the same introduction on the message body? they could but it is not required... it actually interfers with software using UTF8 that do not expect non-ascii bytes at the beginning of a stream... ON> Then authors *know* it potentially has Unicode see above... it does indicate that the stream is unicode... not potentially... ON> and leave it damn well alone, and also parse it based upon UTF8 ON> instead of 8bit char... it is an idea except that everyone else that uses plain ascii will be saying, what's that garbage at the beginning of these messages? ON> This is how I am coding things here, just based upon NexusSQL, ON> PremierSQL, MS SQL, Apache and Nexus Web Service. I do not have access ON> to my Oracle box nor the MySQL 5 server to see if they do the same ON> during the initial connection negotiation(s). it is probably a configuration option... apache shouldn't care as it just sends whatever is in the file... i don't know about nexus... ON> A quick google: It's the utf8 byte order mark. Some editors save the ON> BOM inside the file (in order to be used as a header) which regularly ON> causes confusion because it is optional. ahh, you found it :) ON> So, if we wanted to help enforce at a reader (or even tosser level) ON> how to handle, I would offer this up as a required BOM to the message ON> body that is UTF8. tossers shouldn't be modifying message bodies anyway... that's in the specs... the problem is how some coders interpreted "ignore"... the funny thing is if they chose to ignore the problematic character by stripping it, they actually added code to remove it... if they had selected the other form of ignore and left it in the stream, their code would be (slightly) smaller and faster... it is kinda funny on the one hand... )\/(ark Always Mount a Scratch Monkey Do you manage your own servers? If you are not running an IDS/IPS yer doin' it wrong... .... You know you're in YK when: you have to break your dog loose from the tree. --- * Origin: (1:3634/12.73) .