ietf-mta-filters
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Re: status of 3028bis

2005-10-20 12:17:00

On Thu Oct 20 14:59:04 2005, Alexey Melnikov wrote:

Michael Haardt wrote:

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 02:06:00PM -0700, Philip Guenther wrote:
In particular, there's some uncertainty
over whether comparators take octets or characters as input and how i;octet is defined and used in the definition of other comparators.
[...]

Let "i;octet" work on characters and document the name is a misnomer.

IF someone really feels the need to specify and implement them: Introduce Sieve extensions for a "i;binary" comparator that compares against a string representation of binary data. Introduce new tests "rawheader"
and "decodedheader".

I am not aware how "i;octet" is used at other places, so the above may
only fit well to Sieve.
Your suggestion make sense for header fields. But what about body extension when matching against application/* MIME part?


We need to restrict this discussion to just the one mailing list, really, but I've posted a message saying that actually, the reverse is true - comparators match on octet strings, and happen to have a decode built in - hence i;octet doesn't decode, and i;ascii-* both decode using ASCII.

The notion that comparators work on character strings is a notion that comes pre-flawed - ACAP does not operate on character strings, but octet strings, which might on a good day happen to be UTF-8 encoded text, but might be anything.

I've also suggested that where all the protocol has is a character string, then the semantics of a comparator must behave as though the string were encoded using UTF-8 (possibly by actually doing so).

Dave.
--
          You see things; and you say "Why?"
  But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
   - George Bernard Shaw

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