Re: utf-8 != latin-1

From: George Zeigler (genz1968@mtu-net.ru)
Date: Sat Oct 14 2000 - 08:15:32 EDT


Hello,

      I didn't get it. So what happens if a company had a Job site in Unicode,
and people were copying resume text from Word written in ISO 8859-1
and pasting into a text window in the browser? Does the character set
automatically convert correctly. Or does the user need to use a character set
converter like Recode?

Thanks
George

Sat, 14 Oct 2000, χΩ ΞΑΠΙΣΑΜΙ:
> Here's a gotcha story ..
>
> Someone was working on documentation files in XML. The PDF generator
> all of a sudden started choking, complaining that there was "Illegal
> character U+DC73" somewhere in the late stages of PDF generation. Well,
> the low surrogate certainly didn't belong there. Software bug? Memory
> corruption?
>
> I converted the 1.1mb intermediate file into literal \uXXXX notation and
> searched for DC73. Sure enough, there was lower\uE54E\uDC73e (U+E54E, a
> PUA, and U+DC73) .. in place of what was "lower-case" in the source
> text. Definitely memory corruption.. But wait..
> On a hunch, I deleted the hyphen and replaced it, which worked somehow.
> I was told that the text "lower-case" was copied from another document.
>
> Further inspection showed that the offending hypen was actually \xAD,
> "soft hyphen". Since the XML document had no encoding tag, it defaults
> to ..... UTF-8! What happened was that the sequence AD 63 61 73 was
> interpreted as U+E54E U+DC73..
>
> So moral: BE CAREFUL when you are pasting text into utf-8 documents..
>
> -steven



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