1266   Coding system for VisibleString255

Created: 19 May 2014

Status: Not Applicable

Part: Part 7-3 (2010; Edition 2)

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Category: No impact on this part

Issue

What is the coding system of “d” data attribute? For Russian language, for example, we have Windows-1251, DOS cp866, KOI-8 and other coding systems. Which one to choose? I think the same problem arises in other languages with non-Latin alphabet.
Is it allowed to use UTF-8 coding system for “d” data attribute?
Similar, coding system for data attributes "vendor", "hwRev", "swRev",
"serNum", "model", "location", "name", "owner", "ePSName", "primeOper", "secondOper" is unidentified.
If "d" or "vendor" data attribute contains, for example, a string "?¦?-?+?-?+?+?¦?-?¦?+ ?-" than there is absolutely no way to figure out what language and coding system were used originally.

Proposal

I suggest to make “d” attribute obsolete and use “dU” attribute instead. And I suggest to use UTF-8 coding system for other data attributes with VisibleString255 type ("vendor", "hwRev", "swRev",
"serNum", "model", "location", "name", "owner", "ePSName", "primeOper", "secondOper").

If this is unacceptable, at least, there must be a way to identify language and coding system of human-readable strings in data model.