Hi Alex,

The way I understand it, ASCII is a subset of UTF-8 (i.e. The first 127 chrs
of UTF-8 are the same as ASCII chrs). My vote is to standardize on UTF-8 as
the encoding system. If you wanted to send ASCII (7 bit), then you are
actually sending the exact same bytes on the wire as you would for UTF-8. 

With regard to the space chr. As far as I know, there is only one way to
encode this. ASCII 32 (&h20) = UTF-8 32 (&20) = space. 

Since UTF-8 can handle all of the Unicode characters and matches ASCII for
the first 127 chrs, I believe we should stick to that encoding system. It
also avoids having to add a header to define the character set. 

Apart from ASCII encoding, could you see a requirement for any other
encoding system?

Cheers

Andrew


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alexander Clemm
(alex)
Sent: Thursday, 26 May 2005 12:56 p.m.
To: Rainer Gerhards
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: [Syslog-sec] Syslog protocol - UTF-8 encoding


 
Hi,

2 questions/ suggestions concerning the UTF-8 encoding in the syslog
protocol:

1) Is the " " (white space) after the header to be encoded in ASCII or
UTF-8?  The spec seems currently open to that respect (although it would
seem logical for it to be still in ASCII); should be clarified.  

2)   Concerning the UTF-8 encoding, depending on where you send syslog
messages there are many scenarios in which it would be beneficial to
have an option in which NOT to use UTF-8 encoding but to also allow for
other encodings, in particular plain ASCII.  Such an option would also
allow for quicker adaptation of this specification, as it is eases the
migration.  To provide for that, it seems it would make sense to allow
for a flag in the header part of the message - at the tail end (that is
known to be still ASCII encoded), right before the structured data, that
indicates which encoding is used - that is, whether UTF-8 is in effect,
or if another encoding is used - ex. ASCII, or even proprietary.   

(Apologies in case this aspect was discussed in the past and I am
beating on a dead horse; but this appears important enough to bring up.)


--- Alex
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