ietf-nntp wildmat routines and text

[Charles Lindsey]

In <20000727233251.H8294 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>! A component pattern consists of one or more units (there is no separator
>! between the units). A unit consists of any of the following:
>! [1] any ASCII character in the range %x22 to %x7E except for %x2A, %x2C,
>!     %x2F, %x5B, and %x5C (thus the excluded characters are control codes,
>!     space, exclamation, asterisk, comma, question mark, open square
>!     bracket, backslash, and delete);

You need to point out somewhere that all the excepted ones can be
backslash-escaped.

>! [2] any multi-octet UTF-8 character;
>! [3] backslash, "u", and then four hexadecimal digits;
>! [4] backslash, "U", and then eight hexadecimal digits;
>! [5] asterisk;
>! [6] question mark;
>! [7] backslash followed by any non-alphanumeric ASCII character in the
>!     range %x21 to %x7E;

Why 'non-alphanumeric'. What is wrong with '\A'?

But actually, I think '\x' should mean 'x' for any 'x' (that is a widely
supported convention), so I would be opposed to the \uxxxx stuff for that
reason.

>! In character ranges, the codes used are those of ISO 10646, no matter
>! what the local character set is. If the first character has a higher
>! code than the second, the meaning is undefined.

Is it the case that the collating order of characters expressed in UTF-8
is the same as that of the same characters expressed in full 16/32 bit
Unicode? I seem to recall that it is.

>  Implementers must be careful to apply the pattern-matching process
>  to whole characters encoded in UTF-8, and not to individual octets.

>  5.1  Examples

>! Wildmat    Description of strings that match

An example including a backslashed SPACE would be useful (assuming it is
allowed - it would make parsing arguments somewhat unpleasant).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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