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Re: String conversions UTF8 <-> ISO-8859-1

At 10:58 AM 6/1/2003, Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
>> let me try to restart the discussion a bit.
>I'm not quite sure how to reply to this one - shall I just repost some
>of what I said before?  Well...

Not necessary.  I wanted to take a step back to primary clarify my
previous statements due to missing "not"s, but also just to try to
describe "the problem" as whole.

>First of all, I think you are trying to bite over too much. 

Actually, I'm trying to bit off very little of "the problem".  In fact,
I'd prefer just to provide a few helper routines to have application
developers avoid some tedious coding.

>I think a character set conversion API which tries to be everything
>to everyone is bound to be too clumsy.

I rather not try to solve the complete problem.  I don't think we can.

>Which is why I'm personally only interested in getting it to be useful
>in _most_ cases.  I think people can do their own conversion in the remaining cases.

I think _most_ people will have remaining cases.  That is, _most_
people will still need to do some conversion without the assistance
of the LDAP API.

>> There are applications which use different character sets and encodings
>> when interacting with the user then when interacting with the
>> directory.  Those applications will need access to an appropriate
>> conversion routine.  Personally, I think applications should
>> deal with conversion issues at the user interface, not at the LDAP
>> interface.  (...)
>
>Meaning, the application should think UTF-8 internally?

Unless they got a good reason not to use Unicode/UTF-8 internally, yes.
Otherwise they'll have not only to deal with user<->internal conversions
but internal<->Internet conversions.

>The choice of internal character set in the application is up to the
>application developer, not to us.

Of course, as it they, not us, who live with that choice.

>> Now, you suggested some sort of callback mechanism.  (...)
>
>I'll mostly skip this part for now, since we both have strong opinions
>about it.  Let's see what else we can agree on in general before we dive
>too far into the API choice.

I think we actually agree that we should provide some "help" to application
developers who need to do "conversions".  I think we just disagree over
the choice of the API mechanism to use to provide that "help".

The problem with callbacks is coming up with a reasonable way to
provide enough context so that the application can make the right
conversion.

>> For example, maybe provide a "foreach entry" routine which call
>> an application-specified function on each entry in a message
>> chain (previously provided by the API).  And then a "foreach
>> attribute" routine... etc..
>
>This sounds very slow.  Seems to be it would entail a lot of unpacking
>and repacking of Ber elements in the LDAPMessages.

If we go with callbacks, un/repacking of BER is exactly what we'll be
doing.  If we just provide helpers, the application can do conversion
where they normally do value extraction and hence avoid repacking.

Kurt