Re: FW: Re: Invalid UTF-8

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

> As for %DEFAULT...SCALAR directives (suggested by BlueGM): 

I think a huge problem with the proposal is that it makes YAML "modal". 
If you cut a piece of text out and insert it elsewhere in the file, it 
might not mean the same thing (yet still parse) because you put it 
before/after the directive.

I'm thinking that allowing a *set* of tags might work, though I am not 
sure if this will parse. For instance:

  - !!MyClass "ascii representation"
  - !!MyClass !!binary "adf89asdf00asdfasdf..."

This has some appeal because YAML already allows "zero or one" tag in 
the file. So there already is a variable sized array.

> As far as '%20' goes: I strongly believe that '%20' should be a space
> and not '%' '2' '0' inside such !!utf-u. The only argument against it
> was mangling of URLs, and it fails on two accounts.

I agree with this. Your explanation is good:

> First, there's simply no reason to ever use this tag for encoding URLs.
> All the URLs (actually all the URIs) in the world can be easily
> processed as normal YAML strings. They have their own (%nn) built-in
> escape mechanism. { path: "file://foo%ff" } _already_ works, without
> having to annotate it with !!utf-u. So why would you ever want to?
> 
> Second, even if you decided to pass a URL inside a !!utf-u tag (for some
> strange reason), the fact that %20 would be preserved but %80 would be
> mangled to %2580 is _extremely_ confusing. Requiring % to always be
> escaped as %25 is a no-brainer; it is simple, consistent and follows the
> rule of least surprise.

I think I was confused by thinking that *all* strings would be quoted 
this way. It is only necessary if it has some invalid UTF-8 in it. A URL 
would never have it (as it would *already* be expanded to %nn). And I 
suspect a printf format should not have any in it either, as that means 
it is producing invalid UTF-8 on the output.

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