Re: Invalid UTF-8

On Wed, 2009-09-02 at 16:39 -0700, William Spitzak wrote:
> And look what happens when a user edits the yaml file in a Unicode 
> editor and pastes in some text. All characters in the range 0x80..0xFF 
> will turn into raw bytes! If these are the majority or only non-ASCII 
> then in fact the resulting name is in effect ISO-8859-1!

This seems to be your core concern and the answer is that a Unicode
editor is responsible to convert the pasted text from whatever encoding
it is in into the Unicode encoding used in the file. What if I paste
Hebrew text copied from a text file using ISO-8859-8 into a Unicode
editor? What if I paste Japanese text copied from a text file using SJIS
into a Unicode editor? How is this YAML's problem in any way, shape or
form?

> Please understand what users will see: text in ISO-8859-1 is READABLE, 
> while UTF-8 is UNREADABLE!

I have no idea what you are talking about. UTF-8 is perfectly readable
on any Unicode aware system, including my VIM editor, MS Notepad, any
browser, etc.

If you are running DOS 3.1 and using "code pages", then yes, you are
SOL. YAML is by design not interested in systems that are not Unicode
aware and that treat UTF-8 as "unreadable". This is the 21st century!

> I don't care how much you say the encoding is 
> "UTF-8", it is ISO-8859-1.

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! Read my lips:

> > You keep saying that but it makes no sense and I am completely baffled
> > by it. For the record, and for the last one, I do not suggest YAML uses
> > any encoding other than Unicode (UTF-*), under any circumstance, at any
> > place, in any library, file, API, anywhere, *ever*.
> 
> This has NOTHING to do with the encoding of the yaml file itself. I 
> fully support libyaml writing only valid UTF-8 and it probably is not a 
> huge deal if only valid UTF-8 is accepted on input.
> 
> What I need is a lossless way to store invalid UTF-8 in a scalar, 
> without making valid UTF-8 unreadable in the resulting file. The file 
> format itself can be valid UTF-8 or UTF-16 or UTF-32. I'm sorry my 
> initial posts confused this with the (perhaps unrelated) ability to read 
> invalid UTF-8 files.

We covered that. To do this you need a lossless way to convert between
invalid UTF-8 and invalid UTF-16 and invalid UTF-32, so that the same
YAML file could be loaded by any YAML library regardless of the
in-memory string encoding used ("cross platform portability"). No such
standard method to deal with invalid UTF bytes exists at this point. No
standard or common tool uses anything close to such method. YAML is not
the place to create such a method. If/when such a method exists, we'll
consider adopting it. Until such time as such a method exists, *it ain't
gonna happen*, period.

Have fun,

    Oren Ben-Kiki


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day 
trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on 
what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with 
Crystal Reports now.  http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july