On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 01:28:05PM -0800, Gisle Aas wrote:
As you probably know perl's version of UTF-8 is not the real thing. I
thought I would hack up a patch to support the encoding as defined by
Unicode. That involves rejecting illegal chars (like surrogates,
"\x{FFFF}" and "\x{FDD0}), chars above 0x10FFFF, overlong sequences
and such.
It's worth remembering that overlong sequences are a potential security risk.
Before I do this I would like to get some feedback on the interface.
My prefered interface would be to make:
encode("UTF-8", $string)
imply the official restricted form
I think that would be best.
and then have
encode("UTF-8-Perl", $string)
be used as the name for Perl's relaxed and extended version of the
encoding. The encode_utf8($string) function would continue to be the
same as encode("UTF-8-Perl", $string).
Isn't there a standard name for the 'unrestricted' encoding?
(Might be an IETF RFC rather than a unicode standard.)
This implies that encode("UTF-8", $string) can start failing while
previously it could not.
Anyone working with valid UTF-8 would not get failures.
Anyone who thinks they're using valid UTF-8 but aren't should be grateful!
Anyone not using valid UTF-8 (eg using it as a way to encode integers)
needs to be told in advance - but I doubt there are many and they're
likely to be cluefull users who read release notes :)
I'd say "UTF-8" should mean the official restricted form for perl 5.10.
The only remaining issues are then what to do for 5.8.7
and what to call the unrestricted encoding.
Tim.
