Re: [Json] A possible summary of the discussion so far on code points and characters

A seventh point of view, which I happen to agree with: JSON strings are a
sequence of code units.

This is similar to the definition of 'source text' in ECMAScript:

"ECMAScript source text is assumed to be a sequence of 16-bit code units
for the purposes of this specification. Such a source text may include
sequences of 16-bit code units that are not valid UTF-16 character
encodings."

http://es5.github.io/x6.html

- Rob

On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org> wrote:

> No hat at all, just trying to get some focus on the current facts before
> trying to reach conclusions.
>
> 1) Some people have read the following statement from the RFC to mean
> "only Unicode characters are allowed in strings":
>    A string is a sequence of zero or more Unicode characters [UNICODE].
>
> 2) The ABNF is more liberal about what can be in a string than that
> statement:
>       char = unescaped /
>           escape ( ...
>               %x75 4HEXDIG )  ; uXXXX                U+XXXX
>       ...
>       unescaped = %x20-21 / %x23-5B / %x5D-10FFFF
>
> 3) Some JSON parsers enforce (1), rejecting JSON texts that have strings
> that have some unallowed code points.
>
> 4) Some JSON parsers accept strings with all code points.
>
> 5) The definition of "Unicode character" has been surprising to some
> people on this list, and thus might be surprising to some developers and
> users of JSON.
>
> 6) Some people on the list consider some code points that are Unicode
> non-characters to be more objectionable than other code points.
>
> --Paul Hoffman
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