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Re: [ddlm-group] UTF-8 BOM

Dear Colleagues,

   While it is certainly prudent to tell people to either write a pure
UTF-8 file with no BOM or to prefix it with a BOM, and that is
home a compliant CIF writer should work, it is not practical to
insist the CIF readers should reject embedded BOMs.  Indeed, the
URL cited by John does not tell you they are illegal, but that
you should treat them as a zero width non-breaking space.

   The reason we cannot insist on readers demanding that BOMs occur
at the beginning is that users may concatenate whole CIF or
build one CIF out of fragments of text, and this will very likely
result in embedded BOMs and possibly switches in encodings.  If
we fail to handle the BOMs were are much more likely to garble
such files.  I strongly recommend the approach in my prior
message -- recognize BOMs are all times.

   Regards,
     Herbert

=====================================================
  Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
    Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
         Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

                  +1-631-244-3035
                  yaya@dowling.edu
=====================================================

On Tue, 11 May 2010, Bollinger, John C wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I think CIF processor behavior such as Herb describes would be
> outstanding, and I commend Herb for his dedication to providing such
> capable and robust software.  I do disagree about one of his specific
> points, however:
>
>> The
>> minimum to do with any BOM is:
>
> [...]
>
>>   1.  Accept it at any point in a character stream.
>
> It would be both unconventional and programmatically inconvenient to
> give special significance to U+FEFF anywhere other than at the very
> beginning of a file.  The Unicode consortium in fact addresses this exact
> question in its FAQ: http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#bom6.
> Although the Unicode's comments do allow for protocol-specific support
> for accepting U+FEFF as a BOM other than at the beginning of the stream,
> I see little advantage to adding such a complication to the CIF2
> specifications.
>
> This all expands the scope of the topic far beyond what I had intended,
> however.  I think it is perhaps useful to recognize at this point,
> therefore, that the CIF2 language specification and the behavior of CIF2
> processors are separate questions.  This group has already decided that
> files compliant with CIF 2.0 are encoded in UTF-8, period.  I do not want
> to reopen that debate.  On the other hand, that in no way prevents CIF
> processors from -- as an extension -- recognizing and handling putative
> CIFs that violate the spec by employing character encodings different
> from UTF-8.  That sort of thing is generally heralded as beneficial for
> ease of use, and it is consistent with the good design principle of being
> relaxed about inputs but strict about outputs.  (And in that vein I would
> hope that any CIF 2.0 writer's normal behavior would be to encode in
> UTF-8.)
>
> My suggestion is slightly different, as I hope this restatement will
> show: *in light of the fact that spec-compliant CIF2 files are encoded in
> UTF-8*, I suggest that the spec allow a file beginning with a UTF-8 BOM
> to be spec-compliant (subject to the compliance of the rest of the
> contents).  Like Herb, I intend that my parsers will accept such CIFs
> whether they strictly comply with the spec or not, but the question is
> whether accepting such files should be a compliance requirement or an
> extension.  Either way, I think it will be valuable to document this
> decision in the spec, if only to draw attention to the issue.
>
>
> Best Regards,
>
> John
> --
> John C. Bollinger, Ph.D.
> Department of Structural Biology
> St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
>
>
> Email Disclaimer:  www.stjude.org/emaildisclaimer
>
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