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json carrying important and meaningful data in strings (i.e. blobs in strings) is usually just an exploit on the non-conformance of parsers. JSON strings are de
by corty 6y ago
json carrying important and meaningful data in strings (i.e. blobs in strings) is usually just an exploit on the non-conformance of parsers. JSON strings are defined by ECMA-404 to be UTF8 codepoints. Arbitrary binary data isn't a sequence of UTF8 codepoints. However, that's what it usually is used for, incorrectly.
If you use JSON correctly, a JSON string is really just an UTF8 string. Leaving out the null bytes there would be annoying, yes, but usually doesn't hurt the use as a string...
- jfk13 6y agoA UTF-8 string can perfectly well contain the character U+0000, which will be encoded as a null byte 0x00. So just "leaving out the null bytes" amounts to changing the string to a different string. Sometimes that may be what you want, but it doesn't sound like a good idea in general.
- tremon 6y agoThat was a bit of a rabbit hole. As it turns out, neither the ASCII nul character nor its Unicode equivalent have the semantic meaning "end of stream". ASCII does have control characters for "end of stream", in fact multiple: 0x03 End Of Text, 0x04 End Of Transmission, and 0x17 End Transmission Block. But 0x00 was never intended to be an end marker of any kind. It's really only the C standard that (ab)uses NUL as an end-of-string marker. So yes, after consideration, I'm starting to agree with you. U+0000 is a valid character and should be allowed in text fields.