On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 04:17:41AM -0400, Michael B Allen wrote: > > - knows that the input is zero terminated > > I have great difficulty in envisioning the opposite. Binary file formats > and network protocols have a lot of zero terminated strings in all sorts > of encodings. > > > - does not know whether this is an 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit > > wide and aligned zero > > Again for me it's rare that an application would not need to know what > data it's dealing with. Applications do not exist in a vacuum. You have to > do I/O in which case the the encoding of text is usually predefined or > negotiated. You do not always have the luxury of defining how text is > represeted throughout the system.
However, the case where 1: data is zero-terminated *and* 2: you don't at least know whether you're dealing with an 8-, 16- or 32-bit encoding is, in my experience, non-existant. After all, "zero-terminated" is meaningless unless you know what "zero" means--an 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit zero? -- Glenn Maynard -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
