Shibboleth Developers

[Derek Atkins <>]

I was afraid this was part of the issue.. :(

-derek

Scott Cantor 
<>
 writes:

> After some experimenting, I confirmed that the current code base has a 
> major systemic bug in it, in that it exchanges data in XML as
> UTF-8 but then transcodes everything into the "local code page", typically 
> an ASCII derivative, when it passes the data up to Apache
> for comparisons and export.
> 
> There's not a perfect solution to this really, since most C code pages 
> don't really work with Unicode very well (too many
> untranslatable characters), and Apache of course only knows about C strings.
> 
> The best compromise is probably to standardize more or less on UTF-8 and 
> simply disguise that inside C strings, since ASCII strings
> are directly equatable with it, and null is null in both. I don't have a 
> robust implementation of this yet, but a prototype
> mod_shibrm is working that transcodes attributes into UTF-8, and I've 
> verified an end-to-end attribute with an accented character is
> displaying correctly from Perl once I tell the browser it's a UTF-8 
> document.
> 
> I'm inclined to expose the character encoding to use as a system setting 
> that can be configured, in theory permitting a Japanese
> user to select Kanji perhaps, and if Xerces supports the encoding it might 
> work, sort of.
> 
> This may delay us a tiny bit, since the transcoding interface is pretty 
> primitive and I have to be careful with it, but since the
> Swiss need this, I guess we owe it to them to try.
> 
> -- Scott
> 
> 

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       

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