Alex Shinn wrote:
At Sat, 18 Sep 2004 09:31:02 -0700, Per Bothner wrote:* Most file formats that mix text and binary i/o do *not* handle general strings: often they only support whatever character encoding the "creative" engineers are most familiar with.I think relatively few formats assume a single encoding. Either they tend to treat strings agnostically as a sequence of bytes (leaving encoding interpretation up to the programmer),
Which means they only handle a single encoding.
HTTP, MIME, and most internet standards ...
HTTP is net work protocol, not a file encoding. MIME is primarily a network protocol, though it also ends up being use for email storage. Network people tend to be more aware of internationalization issues - they have to be. I suspect widely use file formats tend to handle internationalized text, since at least somebody involved with specifyin them will have a basic understanding og internationalization. Home-grown file formats are I suspect more likely to be single-format. In any case this is a side issue, of course. -- --Per Bothner per@xxxxxxxxxxx http://per.bothner.com/