NetworkManager and "illegal" SSID chars = crash?

[Owen Taylor]

On 9/5/07, Richi Plana <myfedora at richip.dhs.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 12:44 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > > Shouldn't those octet character strings be converted to Unicode strings,
> > > anyway? I thought that Gtk (via Pango) had displaying international
> > > character down pat.
> >
> > In order to "convert octet character strings" into Unicode and display
> > them, you have to know what encoding the strings are in. Bytes are
> > just bytes until you have an encoding.
>
> I was under the assumption they were 8-bit ASCII strings.

There's actually no 8-bit ASCII. People sometimes use that to mean
Windows codepage 1252
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_code_page).

> Anyway, it's a NetworkManager issue. They would know what the drivers are returning,
> right?

The drivers may well just be returning whatever bytes were sent over
the wire. Now, in any *sane* protocol, the protocol docs would define
what encoding the bytes over the wire are in, but it took a very long
time for people to realize this, so it wouldn't shock me if 802.11b
doesn't specify. Then you'd basically have to do experiments with
common access points to see how they encode things, then add
appropriate heuristics to NetworkManager.

- Owen