NetworkManager and "illegal" SSID chars = crash?

[Richi Plana]

On Fri, 2007-09-07 at 10:32 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> I'd consider the two things actually quite distinct:
> 
>  * D-BUS object path: you want a *unique* *consistent* representation of the
>    bytes of the ESSID. So you might, say, treat them as bytes and do URI-style
>    %XY escaping of bytes that aren't legal ascii characters in the context

+1. It's so easy with computers. Just set a standard (URI specification)
and it starts to make sense everywhere. If we assume that no human will
look at the D-BUS object path except likely the developers, then you can
just adopt whatever's convenient for the devs. ASCII characters seem to
be common for them.

>  * Display to the user: you want to make a best guess at the encoding and try
>    to display the exact same thing that someone typed into the router
> configuration,
>    rather some unique-but-looks-like-garbage escaped version.

At least with documents, there's a lot of heuristic to work on to make
sense (encoding) of the the data. With ESSIDs, you're limited to
32-bytes and aren't even quite sure that they were meant to be treated
as text.

I don't envy the team tasked to design the algorithm for this, but I'm
guessing first, they've to determine if it's supposed to be
human-readable (0x00 bytes interspersed between non nulls is one
indication). Otherwise, re-use some existing code to determine encoding.

P.S. As much as I love reading about this issue, it probably does belong
to a NetworkManager / nm-applet bugzilla or forum.
--

Richi Plana