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[ddlm-group] [THREAD 4] UTF8

• To: ddlm-group@iucr.org
• Subject: [ddlm-group] [THREAD 4] UTF8
• From: James Hester <jamesrhester@gmail.com>
• Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:38:13 +0300

I've started a separate thread for the UTF8 discussion.

John has floated the option of delinking the file encoding from the
syntax specification, so CIF1.2 files could have either ASCII or UTF8
encodings.  I believe that this is unnecessary for the following reasons

1. Encoding can be automatically determined: If a given CIF1.2 file
contains any bytes with values >127 then it can/should only be UTF8.

2. The fact that CIF1.2 syntax allows UTF8 encoding does not mean that
any given string-valued data item could be presented in UTF8:
dictionary writers are free to restrict the character set of data
values. Would such dictionary-based regulation give the PDB and IUCr
sufficient control over UTF8 introduction (John/Brian/Simon?).

3. An additional UTF8 encoding magic number could complicate the
simple magic number scheme we currently have in place.

James.

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