Non-ASCII encoding
Julian Cable
julian.cable at bbc.co.uk
Tue Jul 1 08:53:49 UTC 2008
-On [20080701 09:30], Martin Jerabek (martin.jerabek at isis-papyrus.com) wrote:
>If more non-ASCII characters are going to be included in the tzdata
>files, I would like to propose to define UTF-8 as the official encoding
>of the tzdata files.
I'm a bit ambivalent on this one.
In principle, I agree. In practice UTF-8 has at least one little quirk which has caused me problems:
Microsoft operating systems always start UTF-8 encoded files with a Byte Order Mark (BOM) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark)
*nix-like operating systems never do (at least in my experience) and at least one perl-based xml parser
running on Linux chokes on the BOM.
So I have a practical preference for the 7-bit subset of UTF-8 with no BOM (of course I would never
dream of calling this ASCII ;)
If we go for UTF-8 can we be very firm about whether a BOM is required or prohibited and please make sure its
not permitted.
Julian Cable
BBC World Service
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
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