Re: Text copied from *grep* buffer has NUL (0x00) characters

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 11:13:36PM +0200, R. Diez wrote:
> 
> EZ> That's not the same.  the warning you saw is triggered by a failure to
> EZ> convert to the external encoding, so it consumes no extra CPU cycles.
> 
> But it could be, from my (admittedly naive) point of view:
> 
> (convert-to-external-encoding  but-with-some-extra-flag-to-warn-about-NUL-chars)
> 
> 
> EZ> Null bytes will not fail anything, so you should test for them
> EZ> explicitly (and in some encodings, like UTF-16, they are necessary and
> EZ> cannot be avoided).
> 
> I didn't know that about UTF-16, but I could not find any information about it either. Why is a NUL char necessary in UTF-16 and not UTF-8?

UTF-16 [1] encodes characters using 16 bit "packets" called "code
units". Like UTF-8, whenever one unit isn't sufficient, you use
more. The bit pattern tells you whether there are more to come.

In the case of UTF-16 "more" is at most two.

For the "small" code points, 8 of those 16 bit are zero. Which one
depends on endiannes, but this or that way, you end up with a lot
of zero bytes in your text. That's how UTF-16BE (big endian) looks
like:

  tomas@trotzki:~$ echo "hello, world" | iconv -f utf-8 -t UTF-16BE | hexdump -C
  00000000  00 68 00 65 00 6c 00 6c  00 6f 00 2c 00 20 00 77  |.h.e.l.l.o.,. .w|
  00000010  00 6f 00 72 00 6c 00 64  00 0a                    |.o.r.l.d..|
  0000001a

... so a bit like Swiss cheese.

UTF-16 needs a BOM (byte order mark) to disambiguate on endianness.
UTF-8 doesn't (is a byte stream), although Microsoftey-applications
tend to sneak one in, just to annoy the rest of us.

Or something.

Cheers
 - t

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