John Karp created AVRO-1517:
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Summary: Unicode strings are accepted as bytes type by perl API
Key: AVRO-1517
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1517
Project: Avro
Issue Type: Bug
Components: perl
Reporter: John Karp
Assignee: John Karp
By default in perl, a string is a sequence of bytes, values 0-255. However, if
a Unicode character is included that cannot be represented with a single byte,
the string gets 'upgraded' to a non-byte-based Unicode string allowing ordinals
outside that range. When string operations are done with byte and non-byte
Unicode strings, the result is always non-byte, with the byte string first
'upgraded'. Upgrading consists of utf8 encoding and setting a utf8 flag on the
string. ('utf8' is a variant of UTF-8 used by perl)
The perl Avro API is accepting these Unicode strings as-is for the 'bytes'
type. This is a problem because 1) bytes and Unicode characters are not
interchangeable, and if the user declares they are going to provide bytes they
should provide bytes; any encoding is their job. 2) As Avro assembles the
serialized data, perl 'upgrades' all the data, having the effect of utf8
encoding our serialized binary data.
The correct behavior is for the Avro perl API to raise an error when encoding
'bytes' and a Unicode string has been provided. (The behavior of 'string' won't
change, it will still take Unicode strings as expected.)
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