Sleep Spent

Ever since a few weeks ago when I got a “thank you but could you add this for me please?” e-mail from a professor at SDSU, I’ve been working on fixing up Ph Client for a new release. I’ve been working on a system by which users can add their own ph servers, which is sensible. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s going to look very much like Fire’s Away Message manager, if you’re familiar with that. And not only because I have the code for that, either --- I really think it’s going to be the best way to go. I’ve been kicking it around, trying out different things for days, and this is what I’ve decided on.

Tonight I discovered that if you connected to some international servers, you’d get back accented characters. Characters which are clearly not in ASCII. So they were coming across as É and ^ and the like. Non-optimal.

The solution? Interpret text in the value portion of the server’s query response as ISO Latin-1. Thanks to Latin-1 being a superset of ASCII, servers which respond in ASCII will still work.

Interestingly, since the RFC requires field names composed of [A-Za-z0-9_-], there’s no problems there. I found a French school in Quebec that was using elided names (Telephone) for the fields, and then including the full French name in the value (Téléphone). Kind of strange, but whatever floats your boat.

The more bugs I fix, the more I wonder how people can use the version I released two years ago. :-)

Update: It was brought to my attention that this wasn’t very clear. I’m not removing accented characters, I’m making them work. Thanks, Mr. Lorca.