Does IRC support internationalized room names? - unicode

Does IRC support internationalized (UTF-8) room names?
How? A pointer to documentation or a spec would be welcome.

According to RFCs 1459 and 2812, channel names can be made up of any bytes other than \x00 (NUL), \x07 (BELL), \x0A (LF), \x0D (CR), \x20 (space), , and :. How those bytes are interpreted is entirely up to the client. IRC doesn't impose any specific restrictions on the encoding.
No specific character set is specified. The protocol is based on a set of codes which are composed of eight (8) bits, making up an octet. Each message may be composed of any number of these octets; however, some octet values are used for control codes, which act as message delimiters.

You need to use IRCX protocol extensions from Microsoft
Basically you add a '%' character append your UTF-8 string and perform a post-processing on the result replacing characters using this table:
\b " " (blank)
\c ","
\\ "\"
\r CR
\n LF
\t TAB
Here is the link to the specification:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-pfenning-irc-extensions-04#page-5

Related

Email headers: Allowed/disallowed characters in FROM header: (display) name

I'm trying to find an answer to the question about which characters is allowed (or disallowed) in the
FROM header (display) name..
"My Display Name" <my-email#address.com>
I'm talking about the My Display Name in quotations.
I've looked at tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822 and tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822 but can't seem to find anything specifying these requirements. Perhaps because it accepts all unicode/UTF-8 characters but it doesn't state that either.
Any help or reference to some documentation would be greatly appreciated.
Characters that have values between 33 and 126, inclusive, except colon.
So if your "customer" has this name "Clinic: X" this will be blocked by most email client providers. You can "replace the ":" with " " in that case for example.
See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-2.2
According to Section 2.2 of RFC 5322 : "A field name MUST be composed
of printable US-ASCII characters (i.e., characters that have values
between 33 and 126, inclusive), except colon. A field body may be
composed of printable US-ASCII characters as well as the space (SP,
ASCII value 32) and horizontal tab (HTAB, ASCII value 9) characters
(together known as the white space characters)
Email header fields, of which From is one, can only contain ASCII characters. See Section 3.1.1 of RFC 822. However, RFC 1342 gives a mechanism to work around this limitation.

How do I check if a character is a Unicode new-line character (not only ASCII) in Rust?

Every programming language has their own interpretation of \n and \r.
Unicode supports multiple characters that can represent a new line.
From the Rust reference:
A whitespace escape is one of the characters U+006E (n), U+0072 (r),
or U+0074 (t), denoting the Unicode values U+000A (LF), U+000D (CR) or
U+0009 (HT) respectively.
Based on that statement, I'd say a Rust character is a new-line character if it is either \n or \r. On Windows it might be the combination of \r and \n. I'm not sure though.
What about the following?
Next line character (U+0085)
Line separator character (U+2028)
Paragraph separator character (U+2029)
In my opinion, we are missing something like a char.is_new_line().
I looked through the Unicode Character Categories but couldn't find a definition for new-lines.
Do I have to come up with my own definition of what a Unicode new-line character is?
There is considerable practical disagreement between languages like Java, Python, Go and JavaScript as to what constitutes a newline-character and how that translates to "new lines". The disagreement is demonstrated by how the batteries-included regex engines treat patterns like $ against a string like \r\r\n\n in multi-line-mode: Are there two lines (\r\r\n, \n), three lines (\r, \r\n, \n, like Unicode says) or four (\r, \r, \n, \n, like JS sees it)? Go and Python do not treat \r\n as a single $ and neither does Rust's regex crate; Java's does however. I don't know of any language whose batteries extend newline-handling to any more Unicode characters.
So the takeaway here is
It is agreed upon that \n is a newline
\r\n may be a single newline
unless \r\n is treated as two newlines
unless \r\n is "some character followed by a newline"
You shall not have any more newlines beside that.
If you really need more Unicode characters to be treated as newlines, you'll have to define a function that does that for you. Don't expect real-world input that expects that. After all, we had the ASCII Record separator for a gazillion years and everybody uses \t instead as well.
Update: See http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/tr14-32.html#BreakingRules section LB5 for why \r\r\n should be treated as two line breaks. You could read the whole page to get a grip on how your original question would have to be implemented. My guess is by the point you reach "South East Asian: line breaks require morphological analysis" you'll close the tab :-)
The newline character is declared as 0xA from this documentation
Sample: Rust Playground
// c is our `char`
if c == 0xA as char {
println!("got a newline character")
}

Print Unicode Characters in 8086

As you know, the print function in 8086, puts character in 8bits ( db ) and shows it in screen. Now, i want to print the Unicode character in 8086emu environment not ASCII. So, my challenge is how to use Unicode character in my program ? Does 8086 support Unicode characters?
Thanks in advance :)
If you mean printing in text mode, via interrupt 10h: you can't, as you only have a character map with just 256 characters available. You can redefine how these characters look like (load your custom font), but that still gives you only 256 characters. So you would need to identify the ones you need and then first somehow "render" the ones you need into the character table and for printing you would need to map the Unicode glyph to you character table indexes.
See also my answer to a similar question for more details.

Is Encoding the same as Escaping?

I am interested in theory on whether Encoding is the same as Escaping? According to Wikipedia
an escape character is a character
which invokes an alternative
interpretation on subsequent
characters in a character sequence.
My current thought is that they are different. Escaping is when you place an escape charater in front of a metacharacter(s) to mark it/them as to behave differently than what they would have normally.
Encoding, on the other hand, is all about transforming data into another form, and upon wanting to read the original content it is decoded back to its original form.
Escaping is a subset of encoding: You only encode certain characters by prefixing a special character instead of transferring (typically all or many) characters to another representation.
Escaping examples:
In an SQL statement: ... WHERE name='O\' Reilly'
In the shell: ls Thirty\ Seconds\ *
Many programming languages: "\"Test\" string (or """Test""")
Encoding examples:
Replacing < with < when outputting user input in HTML
The character encoding, like UTF-8
Using sequences that do not include the desired character, like \u0061 for a
They're different, and I think you're getting the distinction correctly.
Encoding is when you transform between a logical representation of a text ("logical string", e.g. Unicode) into a well-defined sequence of binary digits ("physical string", e.g. ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16). Escaping is a special character (typically the backslash: '\') which initiates a different interpretation of the character(s) following the escape character; escaping is necessary when you need to encode a larger number of symbols to a smaller number of distinct (and finite) bit sequences.
They are indeed different.
You pretty much got it right.

What is the email subject length limit?

How many characters are allowed to be in the subject line of Internet email?
I had a scan of The RFC for email but could not see specifically how long it was allowed to be.
I have a colleague that wants to programmatically validate for it.
If there is no formal limit, what is a good length in practice to suggest?
See RFC 2822, section 2.1.1 to start.
There are two limits that this
standard places on the number of
characters in a line. Each line of
characters MUST be no more than 998
characters, and SHOULD be no more than
78 characters, excluding the CRLF.
As the RFC states later, you can work around this limit (not that you should) by folding the subject over multiple lines.
Each header field is logically a
single line of characters comprising
the field name, the colon, and the
field body. For convenience however,
and to deal with the 998/78 character
limitations per line, the field body
portion of a header field can be split
into a multiple line representation;
this is called "folding". The general
rule is that wherever this standard
allows for folding white space (not
simply WSP characters), a CRLF may be
inserted before any WSP. For
example, the header field:
Subject: This is a test
can be represented as:
Subject: This
is a test
The recommendation for no more than 78 characters in the subject header sounds reasonable. No one wants to scroll to see the entire subject line, and something important might get cut off on the right.
RFC2322 states that the subject header "has no length restriction"
but to produce long headers but you need to split it across multiple lines, a process called "folding".
subject is defined as "unstructured" in RFC 5322
here's some quotes ([...] indicate stuff i omitted)
3.6.5. Informational Fields
The informational fields are all optional. The "Subject:" and
"Comments:" fields are unstructured fields as defined in section
2.2.1, [...]
2.2.1. Unstructured Header Field Bodies
Some field bodies in this specification are defined simply as
"unstructured" (which is specified in section 3.2.5 as any printable
US-ASCII characters plus white space characters) with no further
restrictions. These are referred to as unstructured field bodies.
Semantically, unstructured field bodies are simply to be treated as a
single line of characters with no further processing (except for
"folding" and "unfolding" as described in section 2.2.3).
2.2.3 [...] An unfolded header field has no length restriction and
therefore may be indeterminately long.
after some test: If you send an email to an outlook client, and the subject is >77 chars, and it needs to use "=?ISO" inside the subject (in my case because of accents) then OutLook will "cut" the subject in the middle of it and mesh it all that comes after, including body text, attaches, etc... all a mesh!
I have several examples like this one:
Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Actas de la obra N=BA.20100154 (Expediente N=BA.20100182) "NUEVA RED FERROVIARIA.=
TRAMO=20BEASAIN=20OESTE(Pedido=20PC10/00123-125),=20BEASAIN".?=
To:
As you see, in the subject line it cutted on char 78 with a "=" followed by 2 or 3 line feeds, then continued with the rest of the subject baddly.
It was reported to me from several customers who all where using OutLook, other email clients deal with those subjects ok.
If you have no ISO on it, it doesn't hurt, but if you add it to your subject to be nice to RFC, then you get this surprise from OutLook. Bit if you don't add the ISOs, then iPhone email will not understand it(and attach files with names using such characters will not work on iPhones).
Limits in the context of Unicode multi-byte character capabilities
While RFC5322 defines a limit of 1000 (998 + CRLF) characters, it does so in the context of headers limited to ASCII characters only.
RFC 6532 explains how to handle multi-byte Unicode characters.
Section 3.4 ( Effects on Line Length Limits ) states:
Section 2.1.1 of [RFC5322] limits lines to 998 characters and
recommends that the lines be restricted to only 78 characters. This
specification changes the former limit to 998 octets. (Note that, in
ASCII, octets and characters are effectively the same, but this is
not true in UTF-8.) The 78-character limit remains defined in terms
of characters, not octets, since it is intended to address display
width issues, not line-length issues.
So for example, because you are limited to 998 octets, you can't have 998 smiley faces in your subject line as each emoji of this type is 4 octets.
Using PHP to demonstrate:
Run php -a for an interactive terminal.
// Multi-byte string length:
var_export(mb_strlen("\u{0001F602}",'UTF-8'));
// 1
// ASCII string length:
var_export(strlen("\u{0001F602}"));
// 4
// ASCII substring of four octet character:
var_export(substr("\u{0001F602}",0,4));
// '😂'
// ASCI substring of four octet character truncated to 3 octets, mutating character:
var_export(substr("\u{0001F602}",0,3));
// 'â–’'
I don't believe that there is a formal limit here, and I'm pretty sure there isn't any hard limit specified in the RFC either, as you found.
I think that some pretty common limitations for subject lines in general (not just e-mail) are:
80 Characters
128 Characters
256 Characters
Obviously, you want to come up with something that is reasonable. If you're writing an e-mail client, you may want to go with something like 256 characters, and obviously test thoroughly against big commercial servers out there to make sure they serve your mail correctly.
Hope this helps!
What's important is which mechanism you are using the send the email. Most modern libraries (i.e. System.Net.Mail) will hide the folding from you. You just put a very long email subject line in without (CR,LF,HTAB). If you start trying to do your own folding all bets are off. It will start reporting errors. So if you are having this issue just filter out the CR,LF,HTAB and let the library do the work for you. You can usually also set the encoding text type as a separate field. No need for iso encoding in the subject line.