[analog-help] Non-ASCII characters in referrers

[Jason Linhart]

On 10/20/03 1:40 PM analog at welikegoats.com (analog at welikegoats.com) wrote:

>Surely it is dependent on the browser rather than the search engine?

No. We are talking about multi-byte search strings encoded into URLs by 
either a form or the search engine. When the search string is entered 
into the search field by the user, the browser must know the encoding. it 
uses the encoding specified for the field, or lacking that the encoding 
specified for the page that the entry field appears on. That might be any 
of *many* different encodings based on how the pages for the search 
engine are written. The browser limits the set of encodings that might be 
selected to the ones it supports, but all browsers that support 
multi-byte characters support quite a few different encodings.

Analog only sees the referring URL, the browsers/search engines knowledge 
of the encoding is lost. We would need to keep track of which encoding 
was specified by the page at the search engine in order to properly 
interpret the encoded values in the URL.

Actually this comes up for single byte characters with the high bit set 
as well. Fortunately any single byte character with the high bit clear is 
in ASCII. EBCDIC doesn't appear to be supported for web pages and all 
other encodings have ASCII in their first 128 slots. But the moment the 
high bit is set there is ambiguity about what encoding they were using.

Jason

-----------------
Jason at Summary.Net
-----------------
Dr. Seuss books . . . can be read and enjoyed on several levels. For
example, 'One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish' can be deconstructed
as a searing indictment of the narrow-minded binary counting system.
  -- Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets


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