[glue-wg] Strings

[stephen.burke at stfc.ac.uk]

Paul Millar [mailto:paul.millar at desy.de] said:
> The text to be included in Glue 2.0 errata and included in 
> the next revision.

These sound reasonable to me. However, for our current implementation technologies do we know if there is in fact a problem with using UTF-8 everywhere?

> I've had one user complain that they couldn't include a 
> German sharp-s 
> (double-s or ß) in a name attribute.  However, this doesn't 
> really matter for 
> German names: all German "weird" letters have 7-bit ASCII 
> encoded versions 
> ("ß" --> "ss", "ë" --> "ae", etc).

As some people may have seen, the particular problem that triggered this was a German-localised output from a unix "service xxx status", so even if there are alternative spellings that doesn't mean that you'll get them without some special translation. (Actually a google search finds http://www.manticmoo.com/articles/jeff/programming/perl/converting-from-utf8-to-ascii.php which looks like a pretty good quick fix if it works.)

Stephen

PS I have to say I'm a bit surprised in retrospect that I didn't see this coming until we hit a real example, especially after the long discussion about non-standard characters in DNs a year or so back!

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