Whoosh! UTF-8 is not Unicode, it is a transform format. It is also not UTF-16.
There is no need to guess WHEN THE CONTEXT IS UNICODE. I wrote " '00AC'X is not a valid UTF-8 string." Please rebut that, not a claim that I never made. Big endian? For UTF-8? Shirley you're joking. Why should you keep harping on harping on “Unicode is not an encoding” when nobody claimed that it was? ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Phil Smith III <li...@akphs.com> Sent: Monday, May 8, 2023 2:48 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Logical Nor (¬) in ASCII-based code pages? Seymour J Metz wrote, in part: >You seem to be confirming what I wrote; if the locale is UTF-8 then >your character data should be UTF-8. The ¬ character in UTF-8 has a >different encoding from the ¬ character in Unicode, so there is no >issue of a zero octet. '00AC'X is not a valid UTF-8 string. There is no “encoding” “in Unicode”. That’s the point, and is why you can’t say “AC” and expect it to be meaningful. Folks might guess, but (especially with endianness) might get it wrong. ‘00ac’x is indeed invalid as a UTF-8 encoded value, but it’s not the 00 that’s bad (that’s fine, it’s a null): it’s the AC, which is invalid because the top two bits are 10 and that means it’s a continuation byte. So a UTF-8 parser chugs along, sees the 00 and says “OK, good, that’s a single-byte encoding of a null”. But then it looks at the AC and says “Hey, this is supposed to be a continuation, and I’m not IN a multi-byte encoded character, that’s no good”. (One of the cool things about UTF-8 is that, assuming proper UTF-8, you can start in the middle of a string and, if you find you’re at a continuation byte, you can back up to the first byte in the tuple and start from there!) The above assumes big-endian, of course. I’m’a keep harping on “Unicode is not an encoding” because it isn’t and it matters. Former manager beat that into my head, and it took a while for me to get it, so if you’ve bothered to read this far and feel like it’s an artificial distinction, I dig. It’s not. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
