UTF-8 space efficiency

[Kragen Sitaker]

Steve Schafer wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Nov 1999 12:05:17 -0500 (EST), you wrote:
> 
> >And it's "filesystem-safe", which means you can use it in filenames
> >without modifying the filesystem to be Unicode-aware.
> 
> That's not necessarily true. UTF-8 uses octets having values in the
> range of 0x00 through 0xF4. Those greater than 0x7F can cause problems
> with some file systems.

I believe you.  Do you know which filesystems they are?  Unix in
general is pretty charset-agnostic, except for reserving 0x00 and 0x2F
as pathname terminator and pathname separator.

IIRC, this was the major reason the Bell Labs guys invented UTF-8 -- so
the Plan9 filesystem could be dumb.

-- 
<kragen at pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>


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