Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] UTF-8
From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:33:54 -0700

On Aug 20, 2008, at 1:59 PM, Martin Corraine (mcorrain) wrote:

Does Wireshark support the fetching of UTF-8 characters? I believe it's somewhat backwards compatible with ASCII.

Currently, Wireshark doesn't explicitly have any notion of strings being in any particular character encoding.

However, at least when displaying strings in the GUI, if Wireshark is built using GTK+ 2.x, character strings are, at least in some cases, *implicitly* UTF-8, as that's the native character format of GTK+ 2.x.

However however, in a number of places Wireshark "escapes" non-ASCII characters, so it might not display strings as UTF-8.

This needs to be cleaned up at some point (with the ability to say, when fetching a string from a packet, what character encoding is used, and with strings translated between UTF-8 and those encodings as necessary).