Re: [Json] Unpaired surrogates in JSON strings

[Tim Bray <[e-mail]>]

F0, 90, 8D, 86
On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:15 AM, Douglas Crockford <[e-mail]>wrote:

> What  then is the standard name for a 16-bit element of text? When
> JavaScript was created, that word was character. What is the word now?
>

The only somewhat-standardized term would be “UTF-16 codepoint”.  But
that’s not really a “unit of text” any more than the 2nd byte of a
character encoded in 3 bytes with UTF-8 is.

I’m fairly shocked.  I have always believed that JSON encodes what its
introduction (and section 2.5 "Strings") say it encodes, Unicode
characters.

If it is a requirement to accommodate the class of bug where languages that
use UTF-16 (Java, JavaScript, C#) can emit unpaired UTF-16 surrogates, the
spec needs to be clear that the INTENT is actually to support Unicode
characters, and that unpaired surrogates are always evidence of a bug, and
there can be no expectation that any software receiving such buggy data
will be able to do anything useful with it, or even avoid crashing in a
hard-to-debug way down in the bowels of a library routine.  -T