Re: Character encodings in headers [i74][was: Straw-man charter for http-bis]

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

>
> My 2c:
>
>   UTF-8 introduces a requirement that ISO8859-X encodings don't have. UTF-8 
> strings may be invalid, in which case a proper action may be needed (drop ?). 
> Thus, all UTF-8 strings need to be validated.
>   
no.  the last thing we need in HTTP (or any protocol IMHO) is for
intermediaries to try to be smarter than their endpoints.
>   Apart from that, implementations may do various tricks like logging etc, 
> where:
> a) strlen() is used - not unicode aware
>   
strlen works the same for utf-8 as for ascii, as long as what you care
about is number of bytes in the string rather than, say, the amount of
space it will take up when displayed.
> b) iconv() is used to convert ISO8859-1 to UTF-8 either for presentation or 
> for internal storage (python or java perhaps?)
valid point.

Keith