Re: newlines and code page conversion

[Ross Patterson]

On Tuesday 13 May 2003 05:25 pm, Terrence Enger wrote:
> As part of my
> changes I am replacing literal '\012' in the source code by '\n' and then
> making the program explicitly transate to/from ASCII for the client/server
> socket communications.  

I hope you're not talking about changing the over-the-wire protocol, that 
would be "bad".  As would performing wholesale ASCII-EBCDIC translation on 
the connection data (think about binary files - are they shipped as binary or 
encoded somehow, and if so is it safely translatable?).  Of course, if you've 
tried doing any kind of network programming in an EBCDIC world before, this 
is old news to you.  As is the advice to make the code page ids configurable.

> Particularly, does anyone know of a platform where this would cause
> problems?

I've never examined the wire-line protocol, but CVS normalizes the MS-DOS CRLF 
linends to the Unix LF (aka \n) someplace, probably on the client side.

> Thank you all for your attention and thoughts.

Hey, it's an ASCII world out there, we EBCDICers (ex-VMer in my case) need to 
band together :-)
-- 
Ross A. Patterson
Chief Technology Officer
CatchFIRE Systems, Inc.
5885 Trinity Parkway, Suite 220
Centreville, VA  20120
(703) 563-4164