Re: New invalid UTF-8 proposal using tags and %nn

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 5:28 AM, Oren Ben-Kiki <[email protected]> wrote:

> As for what is returned by the library, I agree that the only "safe"
> choice is a byte array. However, the library _may_ choose to return
> something else (such as a word array or even an "almost valid string")
> depending on the platform, as long as it properly preserves the data.


It is also entirely possible for a library to expose options to the
application about how to handle the new data type. Options that a library
might expose include:

1) Always return it as a byte array (I think this should be the default and
required behavior)

2) Throw exceptions/Raise errors if it can't convert it to a valid string
(so if an application only wants to deal with strings, it can)

3) Convert if possible, otherwise return a byte array

For both 2 and 3, a library can expose different options about how to
convert.

Is this something that the YAML spec needs to cover, though? It seems to me
that this is a contract issue between the YAML processor (which is most
likely in a library) and the application.

If the default/required behavior of the library is to return a language
specific string when it can (option 3), then, in my opinion, it probably
should not, by default, handle how invalid byte sequences are encoded into
that string. In other words, the default behavior would be to only convert
the bytes into a language specific string if the byte sequence is valid for
that string type. A library should then expose options to change this
behavior (with a tag handler being the most flexible choice).

The reason I say this is that the method chosen for conversion is going to
be highly application specific. It will depend entirely upon that
application's needs (most notably, whether or not it will retransmit the
data). That is why I say it is largely an issue to be settled between the
processor (most likely in a library) and the rest of the application..

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