Re: Module name mangling

[Dirk Herrmann]

On 30 Jan 2001, Marius Vollmer wrote:

> Martin Grabmueller <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > The RFC for URL-encoding specifies so-called `safe' characters, which
> > do not need encoding.  These are alphanumeric characters an a few
> > others, like `-', `_' etc.  Unfortunaly I don't have the RFC number
> > handy, but I will try to figure that out while at university today.
> > Then I'll post the result of my search.
> > 
> > When we have a list of safe characters, the only thing we need to
> > agree upon is how we encode the unsafe ones. Am I right?
> 
> Yes, exactly.
> 
> Since the list is a list of safe characters, we don't have a list of
> the unsafe ones.  This means that we can't make a mapping from these
> unsafe characters to pretty encodings.  Thus, we would be back to
> hexadecimal encoding.  Hmm.

It surprises me, though, that '%' should be in the list of safe
characters.  However, we are still free to choose or own encoding for at
least those characters, which can be expected to appear frequently in
module names (*, %, /, \, !, ?, <, >, #, +, $, ...).  A fallback to
hexadecimal encoding for the remaining characters would still be
possible.  I am still not sure about how to deal with characters from
other languages, though.

Best regards,
Dirk Herrmann