here's what I know:
according to RFC 977, the newsgroups names are supposed to be in ASCII.
some news servers are set up with non-ASCII newsgroup names. (note,
netscape's old news server did not allow you to do that.)
To fix bugs relating to this, I have used external news servers which
were set up with non-ASCII newsgroup names.
What ever the news server send us, we treat as latin-1.
We do that since we have no way of knowing what the news server system
charset is.
4.x does the same thing, as do other news clients (like sfraser's
MT-NewsWatcher). I'm not sure what outlook does.
see
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&email1=sspitzer&emailtype1=substring&emailassigned_to1=1&email2=&emailtype2=substring&emailreporter2=1&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&changedin=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&short_desc=non+ASCII&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&long_desc=&long_desc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&keywords=&keywords_type=anywords&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&cmdtype=doit&newqueryname=&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time
for some related bugs.
-Seth
Dan Mosedale wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Yung-Fong Tang) writes:
>
>>According to the original NTTP protocol RFC977, it is NOT allowed.
>>However, who only follow the original RFC anyway.
>>
>
> Indeed; RFC 977 is quite dated. I do know that in Europe and Asia
> there are plenty of non-ASCII newsgroup names in use. I don't know
> what encoding(s) they use, but given the age of some of these
> hierarchies, I suspect it's not just UTF8. Added the .mail-news group
> to this post, as I bet some of the folks there know more. Anyone?
>
>
>>http://info.internet.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc977.txt :
>>
>>2.2. Character Codes
>>
>> Commands and replies are composed of characters from the ASCII
>> character set. When the transport service provides an 8-bit byte
>> (octet) transmission channel, each 7-bit character is transmitted
>> right justified in an octet with the high order bit cleared to zero.
>>
>>"RFD 2980 Common NNTP Extension" ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2980.txt )
>>does not improve it
>>However, look at the following. The up-to-dated Internet Draft for NNTP
>>http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-nntpext-base-13.txt
>>say the following
>>
>>3. Introduction
>>
>>.....
>> Every attempt is made to insure that the protocol
>> specification in this document is compatible with the version
>> specified in RFD 977[1]. However, this version does not
>> support the ill-defined SLAVE command and permits four digit
>> years to be specified in the NEWNEWS and NEWGROUPS commands.
>> It changes the default character set to UTF-8[2] instead of
>> US-ASCII[3]. It also extends the newsgroup name matching
>> capabilities already documented in RFD 977.
>>.....
>> 4. Basic Operation.
>>....
>> The character set for all NNTP commands is UTF-8.
>>.....
>> 5. The WILDMAT format
>>
>> The WILDMAT format[5] described here is based on the version
>> first developed by Rich Salz which was derived from the format
>>
>> used in the UNIX "find" command to articulate file names. It
>> was developed to provide a uniform mechanism for matching
>> patterns in the same manner that the UNIX shell matches
>> filenames. Patterns are implicitly anchored at the beginning
>> and end of each string when testing for a match. There are
>> five pattern-matching operations other than a strict one-to-
>> one match between the pattern and the source to be checked for
>>
>> a match. The first is an asterisk (*) to match any sequence of
>>
>> zero or more UTF-8 characters. The second is a question mark
>> (?) to match any single UTF-8 character.
>>
>>.....
>> Implementers must be careful to apply the pattern-matching
>> operators to whole characters encoded in UTF-8, and not to
>> individual octets.
>>.....
>>
>>Naoki Hotta wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I think that's no but I am not sure.
>>>Cc to Momoi san and Frank.
>>>
>>>Naoki
>>>
>>>Xianglan Shirley Ji wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Hi Naoki,
>>>>
>>>>Can newsgroup name be non-ASCII?
>>>>If yes, do you know if there is any news server holding this kind of
>>>>newsgroup?
>>>>
>>>>Thanks,
>>>>Xianglan
>>>>
>>>>
