Re: [NTLK] Special characters in owner info allowed?

From: Dan Mills (vthunder_at_gmail.com)
Date: Thu Aug 19 2004 - 20:58:33 PDT


On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 21:09:03 -0500, Peter H. Coffin
<hellsop_at_ninehells.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 09:27:12PM -0400, Dan Mills wrote:
> >
> > Actually, Unicode is just a catalog. What you are thinking of is
> > (probably) UTF-16, a 16-bit encoding scheme for Unicode. It is not
> > the only one, there is also UTF-8 for example, which is variable-witdh
> > and is actually the same as ASCII for the simple set.
>
> The one he's referring to is UCS-2, which is also what the Newt uses
> internally. UTF-16 is a variable-width superset of UCS-2.

Ah, I did not know UTF-16 was variable-width--though now that I think
about it, that makes sense :-)

unicode.org discourages the use of the UCS-2 term:

http://www.unicode.org/faq/basic_q.html#23

Though perhaps not for older software that was implemented
pre-unicode-2.0? I don't know that level of detail. Presumably by
"doesn't implement any supplementary characters" they mean "is not
variable-width", but then what happens when you interpret a UTF-16
string that uses those characters as UCS-2? Random pairs of garbage
characters? If so, then I don't get why they claim they're identical.

> Gah. Now I'm thinking about work again, dammit.

Sorry ;)

-Dan

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