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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] how to convert to file encode from utf-8 to ASCII?

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:02:18 -0700
On Mar 27, 2014, at 12:22 AM, "??????????" <237825552@xxxxxx> wrote:

> In the readme.developer,it say that the developer should convert the source file encode into ASCII,but when i extract the compress file ,it's default file encode is utf-8,what should i do ?

Find all the non-ASCII characters and either convert them to ASCII (for example, converting non-breaking spaces to ordinary ASCII space characters) or remove them (which means that comments, for example, have to be in English - sorry!).

If you want to contribute your dissector to Wireshark, you must do this.  And, if you want to contribute your dissector to Wireshark, having the comments be in English is a Good Idea, because, for any language *other* than English, there's probably at least one Wireshark core developer who won't understand that language, no matter what that language is - but I suspect all the core developers understand English enough to be able to read the comments.

If, however, you'll only be using your dissector internally, non-English comments are OK, *as long as whatever compiler you're using doesn't have a problem with them*.  I suspect compilers for non-Windows OSes will be OK with non-English comments no matter what the file encoding is, but some Windows compilers may get upset if they see byte sequences that are not valid in your code page, and, unless you're using code page 65001, UTF-8 sequences for non-ASCII characters might be considered invalid.