Hi -
The SNMPv3 working group of the IETF is hoping to make use of UTF-8
for some human-readable information in the MIBs used to manage SNMPv3.
The convention currently used for this kind of information is described
on page 4 of RFC 1903. (For easy reference, I've appended the text
to the end of this message.) We would like to define a new convention
formulated in terms of UTF-8 for use in new MIBs.
What we've not yet reached agreement on is the question of "non-printable
stuff". Some believe that NVT ASCII's control characters are somehow
less problematic than those of 10646, others find the problems equivalent.
The questions that come to my mind are:
1) Is there any merit to the argument that the "non-printable
stuff" in 10646 is any better or worse than the NVT ASVII
definition?
2) Can we use standard character properties to identify a
"printable" subset that would not break for any language?
(The folks that want these also want to have CRLF...)
Background information:
In the SNMP protocol notions of equality and ordering have no
"locale" component. There is no notion of character equivalence.
It is very much a "bits is bits" environment.
The concerns of working group members appear to be arising from:
1) what does it mean to "support 10646"
2) how to display "wierd stuff"
3) how to input "wierd stuff"
4) the old CR/LF problem
Is there a nice, concise, convincing answer I can take back to the
working group?
========== Excerpt from RFC 1903, DisplayString Textual convention ==========
"Represents textual information taken from the NVT ASCII
character set, as defined in pages 4, 10-11 of RFC 854.
To summarize RFC 854, the NVT ASCII repertoire specifies:
- the use of character codes 0-127 (decimal)
- the graphics characters (32-126) are interpreted as
US ASCII
- NUL, LF, CR, BEL, BS, HT, VT and FF have the special
meanings specified in RFC 854
- the other 25 codes have no standard interpretation
- the sequence 'CR LF' means newline
- the sequence 'CR NUL' means carriage-return
- an 'LF' not preceded by a 'CR' means moving to the
same column on the next line.
- the sequence 'CR x' for any x other than LF or NUL is
illegal. (Note that this also means that a string may
end with either 'CR LF' or 'CR NUL', but not with CR.)
Any object defined using this syntax may not exceed 255
characters in length."
========== End Excerpt ===============
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Randy Presuhn BMC Software, Inc. (Silicon Valley Division)
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Fax: +1 408 556-0735 1190 Saratoga Avenue, Suite 130
Email: rpresuhn@bmc.com San Jose, California 95129-3433 USA
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