Re: null termination of keys

["Julian Satran" <Julian_Satran@il.ibm.com>]

Bob,

The reason it was put in is to to enable "parsing" without the C bit.
With key spanning PDUs before having the C bit the sender had to avoid sending a 0 if this was the last byte of the PDU as he had no other means of signaling continuation. A 0 at the end of a PDU meant end-of-LTDS.

Now that we have the C bit we can live with or without having a 0 at the end of the last PDU.
Let's hear some more voices.

Regards,
Julo

"Robert D. Russell" <rdr@io.iol.unh.edu> 06/04/2002 09:48 AM Please respond to "Robert D. Russell"

To:        Julian Satran/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL         cc:        ips@ece.cmu.edu         Subject:        Re: null termination of keys

Julian:

Draft 12-96, section 4.1 defines an LTDS and then says:

"Every key=value pair, excluding the last or only pair in a LTDS,
MUST be followed by one null (0x00) delimiter; the last or only pair
in a LTDS ends at the LTDS end."

This brings us back to where we were in draft 6 -- that key=value pairs
are separated by nulls, not terminated by nulls.  If I remember
correctly, one of the primary reasons that this was changed going to draft
7 is that implementations prefer to treat each key=value pair as one string,
and in C and C++, strings are null terminated.

I do not believe this change is in any way necessary for the LTDS or
C-bit mechanism, and would request that it be put back to the way it has
been from draft 7 through draft 12-94:

"Every key=value pair, including the last or only pair in a LTDS,
MUST be followed by one null (0x00) delimiter."

Thanks

Bob Russell