[Asterisk-Dev] IAX spec: Text formats and character sets

[Olle E. Johansson]

Steve Underwood wrote:
> Michael Giagnocavo wrote:
> 
>>>> Sure, and I think that's agreed to be UTF-8 since that'll allow 
>>>> ASCII-only
>>>> clients to work o.k. in sending Asterisk data. Now people have been
>>>>     
>>>
>>> talking
>>>   
>>>
>>>> about actually getting things implemented inside Asterisk.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>     
>>>
>>> Agreed? By who? A few hours ago people were still posting stuff about 
>>> ISO8859-1 being in current use. :-\
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Yea, I guess agreed on UTF-8 was too strong a phrase. People have said
>> ISO8859-1 is still in use by certain systems. I don't think anyone is
>> arguing that IAX shouldn't use Unicode.
>> I'm guessing that the main issue would be to use UTF-8 or UCS-2. It 
>> really
>> depends how much text is going to be non-ASCII. If you think that Asian
>> language users will be big consumers of IAX, then UTF-8 would be more 
>> of a
>> burden (processing as well as size).  
>>
> UCS-2 is totally brain dead. That is a non-starter. UCS-4 is too bulky. 
> Only UTF-8 makes any sense, and its ASCII compatible. Using UTF-8 is a 
> no-brainer.
SIP already standardized on UTF8. In my proposal, to make it simple, I 
proposed to standardize IAX2 extensions and asterisk to whatever can be 
placed in a tel: url, which is phone-number dial strings. THen to 
somehow extend IAX2 to be able to optionally send UTF8 alphaextensions 
to be able to gateway to SIP.

If we standardize all Asterisk and IAX2 extensions to UTF8, there will 
be considerably much more work.
/O