I've delved into the matter of Lucene and UTF-8 a little further,
and I am discouraged by what I believe I've uncovered.
Lucene should not be advertising that it uses "standard UTF-8" -- or
even UTF-8 at all, since "Modified UTF-8" is _illegal_ UTF-8.
Unfortunately this is how Sun documents the format they use for
serialized strings.
The two distinguishing characteristics of "Modified UTF-8" are the
treatment of codepoints above the BMP (which are written as
surrogate pairs), and the encoding of null bytes as 1100 0000 1000
0000 rather than 0000 0000. Both of these became illegal as of
Unicode 3.1 (IIRC), because they are not shortest-form and
non-shortest-form UTF-8 presents a security risk.
For UTF-8 these were always invalid, but the standard wasn't very
clear about it. Unfortunately the fuzzy nature of the 1.0/2.0 specs
encouraged some sloppy implementations.
The documentation should really state that Lucene stores strings in
a Java-only adulteration of UTF-8,
Yes, good point. I don't know who's in charge of that page, but it
should be fixed.
unsuitable for interchange.
Other than as an internal representation for Java serialization.
Since Perl uses true shortest-form UTF-8 as its native encoding,
Plucene would have to jump through two efficiency-killing hoops in
order to write files that would not choke Lucene: instead of writing
out its true, legal UTF-8 directly, it would be necessary to first
translate to UTF-16, then duplicate the Lucene encoding algorithm
from OutputStream. In theory.
Actually I don't think it would be all that bad. Since a null in the
middle of a string is rare, as is a character outside of the BMP, a
quick scan of the text should be sufficient to determine if it can be
written as-is.
The ICU project has C code that can be used to quickly walk a string.
I believe these would find/report such invalid code points, if you
use the safe (versus faster unsafe) versions.
Below you will find a simple Perl script which illustrates what
happens when Perl encounters malformed UTF-8. Run it (you need Perl
5.8 or higher) and you will see why even if I thought it was a good
idea to emulate the Java hack for encoding "Modified UTF-8", trying
to make it work in practice would be a nightmare.
If Plucene were to write legal UTF-8 strings to its index files,
Java Lucene would misbehave and possibly blow up any time a string
contained either a 4-byte character or a null byte. On the flip
side, Perl will spew warnings like crazy and possibly blow up
whenever it encounters a Lucene-encoded null or surrogate pair. The
potential blowups are due to the fact that Lucene and Plucene will
not agree on how many characters a string contains, resulting in
overruns or underruns.
I am hoping that the answer to this will be a fix to the encoding
mechanism in Lucene so that it really does use legal UTF-8. The
most efficient way to go about this has not yet presented itself.
I'd need to look at the code more, but using something other than the
Java serialized format would probably incur a performance penalty for
the Java implementation. Or at least make it harder to handle the
strings using the standard Java serialization support. So I doubt
this would be a slam-dunk in the Lucene community.
-- Ken
#----------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
# illegal_null.plx -- Perl complains about non-shortest-form null.
my $data = "foo\xC0\x80\n";
open (my $virtual_filehandle, "+<:utf8", \$data);
print <$virtual_filehandle>;
--
Ken Krugler
TransPac Software, Inc.
<http://www.transpac.com>
+1 530-470-9200
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
