Re: Re: UTF-8/non-ASCII chars in keys (was Re: [Sks-devel] 1.0.8 patches)

On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 12:50:09PM +0200, Michael Nahrath wrote:

> Some more examples about the German Umlauts:
> 
> what is the difference in the behaviour betwheen
> 0xC35AB985	Björn Höhrmann		and
> 0xA4357E78	Bj???rn H???hrmann		?
> 
> Is the difference contained in the key data?

Yes.

(Actually, 0xC35AB985 has UTF-8 and old-style userids:

%gpg -k 0xC35AB985
pub  2048R/C35AB985 2000-12-23 Björn Höhrmann <derhoermi gmx.net>
uid                            Bj\xf6\x72n H\xf6\x68rmann <bjoern hoehrmann.de>

by itself.)

The hexdumps of 0xC35AB985 and 0xA4357E78, respectively:

00000110  b4 24 42 6a c3 b6 72 6e  20 48 c3 b6 68 72 6d 61  |.$Bj..rn H..hrma|
00000120  6e 6e 20 3c 64 65 72 68  6f 65 72 6d 69 40 67 6d  |nn <derhoermi@gm|
00000130  78 2e 6e 65 74 3e 89 01  15 03 05 10 3e 44 38 aa  |x.net>......>D8.|

000001a0  d7 43 24 1b aa b4 22 42  6a f6 72 6e 20 48 f6 68  |.C$..."Bj.rn H.h|
000001b0  72 6d 61 6e 6e 20 3c 64  65 72 68 6f 65 72 6d 69  |rmann <derhoermi|
000001c0  40 67 6d 78 2e 6e 65 74  3e 88 46 04 10 11 02 00  |@gmx.net>.F.....|

show the former uses UTF-8 (%C3%B6) and the latter uses old-style
extended characters (%F6) for Umlauts.  If you can coax your browser
into sending a non-UTF-8 query for "Björn," it should ask for:

  search=Bj%F6rn 

instead of:

  search=Bj%C3%B6rn

There are plenty of keys using each encoding, as well as those that
spell it "Bjoern" for the full name, which is often used in the usually
ASCII-only email addresses too.

-- 
Jason Harris           |  NIC:  JH329, PGP:  This _is_ PGP-signed, isn't it?
[email protected] _|_ web:  http://keyserver.kjsl.com/~jharris/
          Got photons?   (TM), (C) 2004

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