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At 3:57 PM -0500 12/19/01, Jonathan Borden wrote:
>Hmmph... well I don't profess to understand much of this character stuff,
>but it seemed to me logical that character refs would be a good way to
>escape characters not otherwise allowed in text ... I'm sure there is a good
>reason why this isn't allowed -- I mean it does let me stuff an < into an
>attribute, so what is the huge difference between that and � ? Oh well,
>I never should have piped in on this thread anyways...
>
The difference is that < is a legal character in C strings whereas
NUL is not. Once the parser decodes that reference and tries to stick
it in a string or stuff it in a database, all hell can break loose.
Some languages are more hell-resistant than others, but it's a big
enough problem that it does need to be considered.
--
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| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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