Re: libvc 003 released with vCard 2.1 compatibility and question for the public

Enclosed are just two text files (non-VCF) of file w/
a LE-BOM and a BE-BOM.

It is required by the Unicode spec.  But Apple doesn't
include it.  I found though that they are able to
parse either.  No I don't have a Mac anymore so I
cannot experiement.

I enclosed them as .zip files to ensure the itegrity
of the file. I am worried yahoo mail might mangle them
somehow.

 - Joaquin

PS - MSWord2000 supports created files in a variety of
formats.  One could always open a rename a .VCF to
.TXT save it as another format, and then change it
back to .VCF.

--- Sam Roberts <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Quoteing [email protected], on Fri, Jun 20, 2003
> at 09:48:02PM -0700:
> > Wow.  I am impressed.  I didn't know there was
> ruby
> > support out there.
> 
> Well, see how well it works for you before being too
> impressed!
> 
> > But don't you have to check the BOM to determine
> if
> > the double-byte is in little endian or big endian?
> 
> I don't know anything about BOMs, other than they
> exist. Have you
> seen a vCard with one? Apple's don't have them, they
> look like:
> 
> 0000000: 0042 0045 0047 0049 004e 003a 0056 0043 
> .B.E.G.I.N.:.V.C
> 0000010: 0041 0052 0044 000d 000a 0056 0045 0052 
> .A.R.D.....V.E.R
> 0000020: 0053 0049 004f 004e 003a 0033 002e 0030 
> .S.I.O.N.:.3...0
> 0000030: 000d 000a 004e 003a 004c 0065 0062 0065 
> .....N.:.L.e.b.e
> 
> I'm just checking if the first char is 0, and if so,
> since it is
> definitely not ascii, or latin-*, assuming it's
> ucs-2.
> 
> I just tried this:
> 
> irb(main):005:0> s = "\0b\0e"
> "\000b\000e"
> irb(main):006:0> Iconv.iconv('ascii', 'ucs-2', s)
> ["be"]
> irb(main):007:0> s="b\0e\0"
> "b\000e\000"
> irb(main):008:0> Iconv.iconv('ascii', 'ucs-2', s)
> Iconv::IllegalSequence: "b\000e\000"
>   from (irb):8:in `iconv'
>   from (irb):8
> 
> 
> So, iconv(), at least, doesn't like the opposite
> byte order.
> 
> > I know Apple doesn't support the BOM, but they
> seem to somehow handle
> > both cases.  I need to experiement though to find
> out exactly.
> 
> Could you send me some samples of the other byte
> order, or ones with
> BOMs? I'll try and decode them.
> 
> > If you can do that in an hour, that's impressive. 
> I
> 
> I'm not doing the unicode converting myself, I'm
> using iconv from
> ruby1.8, you can get it for 1.6 from ruby-sumo, or
> shim-ruby.
> 
> It should correctly deal with BOMs, and I think I've
> seen it doing so.
> 
> > was thinking of playing with IBM's open source
> > freeware library for Unicode, as this would be a
> more
> > cross-platform solution.
> 
> I don't know anything about IBM freeware, but many
> unix systems have the
> iconv() library function, if your system doesn't
> have it try;
> 
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/
> 
> Ruby's Iconv uses iconv(), of course!
> 
> > Though this is down the road.  I think all too
> often
> > vendors ignore multi-lingual and murder even UTF-8
> > streams. :-/  So, hopefully some open source
> solutions
> > can help in that regard.
> 
> I think vCard 3.0 murdered multi-lingual support by
> assuming that vCards
> would only be transported in MIME wrappers, so they
> took characterset
> information out of it, so now you have no way to
> know the characterset
> of a vCard sitting in a stand-alone file.
> 
> Cheers,
> Sam
> 

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