[dhcwg] Interpretation of Option 60 (Vendor Class ID)

["Cosmo, Patrick" <[e-mail]>]

RFC 2132 states that option 60 "is a string of n octets". We are having a
little debate about how to interpret this and would like to know how others,
and the working group, interpret this option.

Some of us feel that "octet != character" and that this _could_ be binary
data.

On the other hand, none of us are aware of any devices that send binary
(non-ascii) data for this option. This reinforces the opinion that the term
"string" implies a character string. Some of us all do not feel that the
word "octet" necessarily implies that these are not characters: since an
"octet" and a "character" are both a single byte, and for some character
tables (ISO-Latin-1) all values 1 - 254 are used as characters, with 0 being
the string termination character, the word "octet" does not necessarily
indicate that that this is binary data.

comments?

does anyone know of any devices that send data for this option which cannot
be interpreted as a string?