Re: g_utf8_validate() and NUL characters

["Nikolai Weibull" <now bitwi se>]

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 13:20, Havoc Pennington <hp pobox com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 cornell edu> wrote:

>> I think what he really meant (or if not, here's my take on it) was that NUL
>> bytes aren't *printable* text... like you'd say of low-value ASCII data.
>>  Sure, it's technically "text," but most of it isn't something you can
>> represent visually in a useful manner.

> Exactly. I don't see why you would ever want a nul byte, in a
> situation where text is expected.

Valid UTF-8 and printable text are different concepts.

> Another way to put it, I don't think nul bytes are a user-explainable
> concept. If anybody who isn't a programmer sees (how? what's the
> glyph?) a nul byte in a _text_ file, that's just bizarre.

How is "oh, you can't open /that/ file in a text editor because it has
a character in it that isn't a user-explainable concept" (I'm not
trying to make a straw man argument) better than simply opening the
file, displaying the NUL as a box with 0000 in it (like Pango does for
other characters it can't render) and be done with it?  I don't see
how it's the programs responsibility to state what can and what cannot
be in a file the user wants to open, as long as the file is valid in
the chosen encoding.