Re: [Obo-format] OBO file character encoding

[Hilmar L. <hl...@du...>]

On Feb 7, 2008, at 2:00 PM, Jim Balhoff wrote:

> I think it would be great to have something like "encoding:  
> UTF-8" (or whatever encoding) in the document header.  It could be  
> optional, and UTF-8 could be standardly assumed if no encoding is  
> specified.  While I don't have a good idea of what the consequences  
> for current ontologies would be if the OBO.jar parser started  
> assuming UTF-8, I think it would be better than the current  
> situation which I think depends on the OS and default charset a  
> user is running.


If the current status is that all OBO ontologies must be in US-ASCII,  
then assuming UTF-8 should make no difference for those, right?

Hence, one could also simply stipulate that OBO-formatted ontologies  
have to be in UTF-8 (which subsumes ASCII-only).

I like the encoding: tag for the flexibility, and more so even for  
the explicitness, but of course then ontology-reading software should  
say which encodings it supports (aside from a common standard, say  
UTF-8).

	-hilmar
-- 
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
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