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Re: RS/RE



At 11:05 PM 12/9/96 +0100, Steven J. DeRose wrote:
>At 05:41 PM 09/12/96 GMT, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>
>>Well, from my reading of the SGML Handbook, it seems that RE and RS
>>are not *required* at all. If they occur, they are put there by the
>>entity manager. In fact, RE and RS are not really even characters per
>>se, they are kind of psuedo-characters (they have a code, and a name,
>>but they aren't real characters).
>
>Right. For example, consider a file from VM (IBM mainframe OS): VM does not
>represent record boundaries by characters: instead, it either makes all
>lines the same length (RECFM F to us ancients), or puts a length prefix in
>front of each record (RECFM V). So RS and RE clearly cannot be characters in
>the source document; if they show up at all, it is because the entity
>manager inserted them. Same is true on other systems, even though RS looks a
>lot like linefeed, and RS looks a lot like carriage return, they're not the
>same thing. 

Taking this one stage further, having agreed to use ISO 10646 coding we
should, therefore, be consistent and use the ISO 6429 control codes
referenced in 10646. These define a Record Separator as Hex 1E, and a Unit
Separator as Hex 1F. Would these do as replacement values for RE/RS?
----
Martin Bryan, The XML Outside, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.u-net.com/~sgml/



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