Network Working Group J. Klensin
Internet-Draft January 18, 2007
Expires: July 22, 2007
ASCII Escaping of Unicode Characters
draft-klensin-unicode-escapes-00.txt
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Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).
Abstract
There are a number of circumstances in which an escape mechanism is
needed in conjunction with a protocol to encode characters that
cannot by represented or transmitted directly. With ASCII coding the
traditional escape has been either the decimal or hexadecimal offset
of the character, written in a variety of different ways. The move
to Unicode, where characters occupy two or more octets and may be
coded in several different forms, has further complicated the
question of escapes. This document discusses some the options now in
use and makes a proposal for general use in IETF protocols.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Context and Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3. Discussion List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Proposal for a Standard Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Rationale and Other Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Unicode Table Position versus UTF-8 Octets . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Presentation Variants for Unicode Table Position . . . . . 5
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . . . 8
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1. Introduction
1.1. Context and Background
There are a number of circumstances in which an escape mechanism is
needed in conjunction with a protocol to encode characters that
cannot by represented or transmitted directly. With ASCII [ASCII]
coding the traditional escape has been either the decimal or
hexadecimal offset of the character, written in a variety of
different ways. For example, in different contexts, we have seen
%dNN or %NN for the decimal form, %NN, %xNN, X'nn', and %X'NN' for
the hexadecimal form. "%NN" has become popular in recent years to
represent a hexadecimal value without further qualification, perhaps
as a consequence of its use in URLs and their prevalence. There are
even some applications around in which octal forms are used and,
while they do not generalize well, the MIME Quoted-Printable and
Encoded-word forms can be thought of as yet another set of escapes.
So, even for the fairly simple cases of ASCII and extended ASCII, we
have been living with several different escaping forms, each the
result of some history.
When one moves to Unicode [Unicode] [ISO10646], where characters
occupy two or more octets and may be coded in several different
forms, the question of escapes becomes even more complicated. In
particular, we have seen fairly extensive use of both hexadecimal
representations of the UTF-8 encoding [RFC3629] of a character and
variations on the U+NNNN[N[N]] notation commonly used in conjunction
with the Unicode Standard. This document proposes that a specific
variation on the latter SHOULD be used in protocols unless other
considerations apply and explains that choice.
In addition to the protocol contexts addressed in this specification,
escapes to represent Unicode characters also appear in presentations
to users, i.e., in user interfaces (UI). The formats specified in,
and the reasoning of, this document may be applicable in UI contexts
as well, but this is not a proposal to standardize UI or presentation
forms.
1.2. Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
1.3. Discussion List
Discussion of this document should be addressed to the
discuss@apps.ietf.org mailing list.
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2. Proposal for a Standard Form
For the reasons discussed in the next section, the forms
\UNNNNNNNN (for any Unicode character) and
\uNNNN (for Unicode characters in plane 0)
are generally preferred for use when an ASCII escape for embedded
Unicode characters is needed in protocols. Specifically, in ABNF
[RFC4234],
EmbeddedUnicodeChar = BMP-form Full-form
Hex-quad = 4*4 HexDigit
BMP-form = "\u" Hex-quad
Full-form = "\U" 2*2 Hex-quad
HexDigit = "0" / "1" / "2"/ "3"/ "4"/ "5"/ "6"/ "7"/ "8"/ "9"/ "A"/
"B" / "C"/ "D"/ "E"/ "F"
This form SHOULD be used in IETF protocols that require Unicode
character escaping unless there are substantial reasons for using
something else. For the convenience of the reader, it is generally
preferred for documentation in IETF-related running text as well
(e.g., in RFCs) although the U+NNNN form MAY be used when Unicode
character encoding is clearly expected.
3. Rationale and Other Alternatives
There are many different ways to designate, encode, or call out a
Unicode character. Given adequate decoding facilities, all of these
other than the formal character name are equivalent. However, when
information about characters is to be processed by people,
information about the Unicode code point is preferable to a further
encoding of the encoded form of the character and it is desirable to
reduce confusion by designating one form as preferable. These issues
are discussed in the following subsections.
3.1. Unicode Table Position versus UTF-8 Octets
There are two major families of ways to represent Unicode characters.
One uses the code point position in the table in some representation
(see the next section), the other encodes the octets of the UTF-8
encoding. Some other options are possible, but they have been rare
in practice. This specification recommends that, in the absence of
compelling reasons to do otherwise, the Unicode code point forms be
used rather than the UTF-8 ones. There are several reasons for this,
including:
o One reason for the success of many IETF protocols is that they use
human-interpretable text forms to communicate, rather than
encodings that generally require computer programs (or hand
simulation of algorithms) to decode. This suggests that the
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presentation form should reference the Unicode tables for
characters and to do so as simply as possible.
o The nature of UTF-8 implies that a decimal or hexadecimal numeral
representation of UTF-8 requires conversion to the UTF-8 form,
then conversion from the UTF-8 form to a Unicode character
position form in order to look the character up in a table. That
may be appropriate in some cases where the goal is really to
represent the UTF-8 form but, in general, it just obscures desired
information and makes errors more likely and debugging harder.
o Except for characters in the ASCII subset of Unicode (U+0000
through U+007F), the character code position form is generally
more compact than forms based on coding UTF-8 octets, sometimes
much more compact.
The same considerations that apply to encoding of UTF-8 octets also
apply to more compact ACE encodings such as the "bootstring" encoding
[RFC3492] with or without its "Punycode" profile.
3.2. Presentation Variants for Unicode Table Position
There are a number of different ways to represent a Unicode code
point position. The forms suggested here -- "\U" followed by eight
hexadecimal efforts for general use and, optionally, "\u" followed by
four hexadecimal digits for references to Unicode Plane 0 (the "BMP")
-- were chosen because of their use in several programming languages,
notably the "new character" extensions to ISO Standard C
[ISO-C-Chars].
Other forms that were considered, and that may sometimes be
encountered and justified, include:
o Perl uses the form \x(NNN...). The advantage of this form is that
there are explicit delimiters, resolving the issue of having
variable-length strings or using the case-change mechanism of the
proposed form to distinguish between Plane 0 and more general
forms. Some other programming languages would tend to favor
X'NNN...' forms for hexadecimal strings and perhaps U'NNNN...' for
Unicode-specific strings, but those forms do not seem to be in use
around the IETF.
o Java uses the form \uNNNN, but can represent characters outside
Plane 0 (i.e., above U+FFFF) only by the use of surrogate pairs.
Decoding (or de-mapping) surrogates raises some of the same issues
as the use of UTF-8 octets discussed above. Codings that depend
on surrogates SHOULD NOT be used. For characters in Plane 0, the
Java form is identical to the recommended Plane 0-only form
recommended above.
o HTML and XML use the form &#xNNNN;. Like the Perl form, this form
has a clear terminator, reducing ambiguity. However, it is
generally considered ugly and awkward outside of its native HTML,
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XML, and similar contexts.
There is one significant disadvantage of the recommended form. The
use of a case variation (between "u" for the four digit form and "U"
for the six digit form) may not seem natural in environments in which
upper and lower case characters are generally considered equivalent
and might be confusing to people who are not very familiar with
Latin-based alphabets (although those people might have even more
trouble reading relevant English text and explanations). There
appears to be consensus that existing standards and wide current use
outweigh that objection.
4. Security Considerations
This document proposes a specific mechanism for encoding Unicode
characters when other considerations do not apply. Since the
encoding is unambiguous and normalization issues are not involved, it
should not introduce any security issues that are not present as a
result of simple use of non-ASCII characters, no matter how they are
encoded. The mechanism suggested should slightly lower the risks of
confusing users with encoded characters by making the identity of the
characters being used somewhat more obvious than some of the
alternatives.
5. Acknowledgments
This document was produced in response to a series of discussions
within the IETF Applications Area and as part of work on email
internationalization and internationalized domain name updates. It
is a synthesis of a large number of discussions, the comments of the
participants in which are gratefully acknowledged. The help of Mark
Davis in constructing a list of alternative presentations and
selecting among them was especially important.
6. References
6.1. Normative References
[ISO10646]
International Organization for Standardization,
"Information Technology - Universal Multiple- Octet Coded
Character Set (UCS)"", ISO/IEC 10646:2003, December 2003.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
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[RFC3629] Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO
10646", STD 63, RFC 3629, November 2003.
[RFC4234] Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", RFC 4234, October 2005.
[Unicode] The Unicode Consortium, "The Unicode Standard, Version
5.0", 2006.
(Addison-Wesley, 2006. ISBN 0-321-48091-0).
6.2. Informative References
[ASCII] American National Standards Institute (formerly United
States of America Standards Institute), "USA Code for
Information Interchange", ANSI X3.4-1968, 1968.
ANSI X3.4-1968 has been replaced by newer versions with
slight modifications, but the 1968 version remains
definitive for the Internet.
[ISO-C-Chars]
International Organization for Standardization,
"Information technology -- Programming languages, their
environments and system software inferfaces -- Extensions
for the programming language C to support new character
data types", ISO/IEC TR 19769:2004, July 2004.
[RFC3492] Costello, A., "Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode
for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications
(IDNA)", RFC 3492, March 2003.
Author's Address
John C Klensin
1770 Massachusetts Ave, #322
Cambridge, MA 02140
USA
Phone: +1 617 245 1457
Email: john-ietf@jck.com
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