[web-devel] Proposal: http-types

[Johan Tibell]

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Curt Sampson <cjs at starling-software.com> wrote:
> On 2011-02-02 16:43 +0100 (Wed), Johan Tibell wrote:
>
>> Are you sure that no headers are defined as octets (i.e. binary data).
>> If some are they will have all 8 bits set possibly.
>
> Some are indeed so. See, e.g., comments in HTTP headers (RFC2616 section
> 2.2), which are 'ctext' surrounded by parens; ctext is 'any TEXT
> excluding "(" and ")"'; TEXT is 'any OCTET except CTLs...', and OCTET is
> 'any 8-bit sequence of data.'
>
> That said, there is no method within the standard to specify the
> encoding of anything, so stuff like that needs to be treated as more or
> less opaque binary data, anyway.

Right. So converting it to a Unicode type is dangerous. As operations
on the Unicode type might yield errors for invalid code points
generated by casting binary data to Unicode.