On 14 Sep 2009, at 9:05 pm, John Cowan wrote:

[nasty stateful encodings]
> The bad case is ISO 2022 where multiple different encodings are used,
> several at a time, and you use an escape sequence to switch from one
> to
> another.  See the Wikipedia article for the incredibly grotty details.
> I actually implemented this in the front end to FIGlet.

*nod*

> Anyhow, when you've read the last character in a run, have you
> or have you not read the bytes of the escape sequence that
> terminates the run?

Depends on how the run is terminated, leading onto:

>> I ask because it's not uncommon to interleave binary and text in a
>> stream. Many binary formats have embedded strings, for example.
>
> True, but the delimitation of the string is format-specific: fixed
> length, counted, and NUL-terminated are all in use.  That's not
> something a general-purpose package can easily handle.

...no, but a general-purpose package ought to provide the tools to
handle these problems, or else it's not so general-purpose :-)

ABS

--
Alaric Snell-Pym
Work: http://www.snell-systems.co.uk/
Play: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
Blog: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/author/alaric/




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