Re: string value encoding and escaping question

[Jim Sermersheim <JIMSE@novell.com>]

I recently had a similar question.  It appears the '#' is used to delimit disparate elements and '$' is used to delimit like elements in a list, but there are (history based) exceptions to that rule.  Actually, there are no instances I could see where '#' is used to delimit list elements, but there are definitions where '$' is used to delimit (non-list) elements.  

Is the discussion of a recommended (future) usage of separator characters interesting?


>>> Jeff Hodges <Jeff.Hodges@Stanford.edu> 2/11/99 4:17:31 PM >>>
Mark Smith wrote:
> 
> The origin of the '$' separator is the Quipu X.500 implementation (it
> used '$' inside various string syntaxes because '$' is not a valid
> character in the T.61 character set which was used for some string
> syntaxes in the olden days).  

If '$' isn't treated specially protocol-wise, then the only value of using it
as a separator is consistency with "tradition" and thus perhaps reuse of some
amount of attribute value parsing code out there, tho we don't really have a
large body of that ourselves.