Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] UTF8 vs. locale in error messages (bug 5715)
On Jun 28, 2011, at 6:10 AM, Stig Bjørlykke wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 2:58 AM, Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 1) UN*Xes where LANG etc. aren't set to a locale with UTF-8 as the encoding (are you seeing the issue with Norwegian characters on your system? If so, what's the setting of LANG?);
>
> I only had issues with Norwegian characters in file names reported via
> simple_dialog(), and my LANG is empty.
OK, what OS are you using? If it's a UN*X, try compiling and running the attached C program; does it print your name correctly on your terminal/terminal emulator (it writes it out in UTF-8), and does the file it creates (your name is its name - yeah, complete with a space between "Stig" and "Bjørlykke", and with no ".txt" at the end) have a name that shows up correctly if you do "ls"? If it's Windows, then you're probably just seeing bug 5715.
> Another problem is that we still have issues regarding UTF-8 strings
> in packets. We should really fix that...
We have an issue regarding strings in packets in general. Strings might be in a number of encodings, including ASCII (meaning that any byte with the 8th bit set is something that shouldn't be there), other national variants of ISO 646, UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-2 (meaning "only the Basic Multilingual plane, with no surrogate pairs"), ISO 8859/x for various values of x, various ISO 2022-based encodings (e.g., the EUC encodings), various national standards, various DOS and Windows code pages, various Mac OS encodings, EBCDIC, whatever encodings are used for SMS, etc., etc., etc, etc.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Character_encoding
I don't know whether all of the encodings in question can be mapped to Unicode without information loss. An arbitrary string of octets definitely can't be mapped to UTF-8 without information loss; consider a putatively UTF-8-encoded string that contains an octet sequence that's not valid in UTF-8.
Perhaps, in the Wireshark dissection engine, we should initially store string values as a pair {encoding, counted octet string} (counted so that octets with the value 0 don't cause problems), and:
when putting them into a textual representation of the protocol tree or into columns or something else to be shown to humans, map them to UTF-8, with anything that can't be mapped to UTF-8 - including, if the encoding is putatively UTF-8, octet sequences that aren't valid UTF-8 sequences - shown as the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD;
when comparing them in a display filter, attempt to map them to UTF-8 (and save the result), and:
if the mapping fails, treat *all* comparisons except for inequality as failing, and treat comparisons for inequality as succeeding;
if the mapping succeeds, compare the two strings;
when making them available to software inside *Shark (C/C++ code, Lua code, Python code, etc.), attempt to convert them to whatever the appropriate representation is (presumably UTF-8), and have the routines to fetch those values support returning a "conversion failed" indication (or perhaps offer both a "convert for display to humans" version that uses U+FFFD for failure and a "convert for processing" version that returns "can't do it" for failure).
Here's the program I mentioned above:
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norsk.c
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