[Slackbuilds-users] Odd character in JSONObject.info file

B Watson yalhcru at gmail.com
Sat Feb 16 11:32:24 UTC 2013


On 2/16/13, Vito De Tullio <vito.detullio at gmail.com> wrote:

> it's the BOM...

Someone set up us the BOM!

(sorry, couldn't resist)

> but why is it there? shouldn't the file contains just ASCII
> characters??

Nowhere on the slackbuilds.org site does it say that. And the submitter's
got a non-ASCII character in his first name (the letter á), so the
MAINTAINER field has that character in it because that's how he spells
his name.

He happened to use a text editor that adds the BOM when it's writing a
UTF-8 file (which I think is a bad idea, but is a pretty standard thing
in some circles), and the checking code on the site didn't catch it,
possibly because it's using a library that handles the BOM transparently
(so the code using it, never sees the BOM).

>From a quick look at the .info files, it appears that all but two of
them are either ASCII-only, or Unicode UTF-8 without the BOM. ASCII is
a subset of Unicode (it's just the first 128 characters), so really out
of 3500+ .info files, all but two of them are Unicode text with UTF-8
encoding. So maybe UTF-8 without BOM should be the standard, and the
site should say so, and kick out an error if someone drops a BOM on it...

The two that are different are JSONObject.info (UTF-8 with the BOM)
and development/snappy/snappy.info (it's ISO-8859, not Unicode at
all). However, snappy.info doesn't break sbopkg, so it's not really
a problem.


More information about the SlackBuilds-users mailing list