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

[Steve Underwood]

Olle E. Johansson wrote:

> Steve Underwood wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I raised this with Mark ages ago, when I started putting Chinese into 
>> IAX2 messages. I thought it should be specified that all text is 
>> Unicode in UTF-8 form, but he seemed pretty indifferent to specifying 
>> anything.
>>
>> There is no need to have ASCII + UTF-8. ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, 
>> so they are fully compatible. Its only when you have 8 bit sets, like 
>> the PC ones, that compatibility is an issue. Just define that all 
>> strings in IAX2 are UTF-8, and that is the end of it.
>>
> ...yes, I'll admit that is an easy way out. But we still need to handle
> conversion to ISO8859-1 caller ID's and find a way to do pattern 
> matching and how to use "." and "@" in IAX to call SIP uri's - there 
> are many things to consider. (The @ in an IAX2 dialstring separates 
> extension from context...)

Caller IDs are normally ASCII, not ISO8859-1. The other characters are 
no problem. UTF-8 will pass them through without trouble. UTF-8 is 
highly compatible with ASCII. URIs are kind of nasty, as they were not 
internationalised from day one.

Regards,
Steve