Re: [Obo-format] OBO file character encoding

[Chris M. <cj...@fr...>]

On Feb 7, 2008, at 11:00 AM, Jim Balhoff wrote:

> On Feb 7, 2008, at 1:29 PM, Hilmar Lapp wrote:
>
>> On Feb 7, 2008, at 11:49 AM, Chris Mungall wrote:
>>
>>> I think the recommendation would be to avoid non-ascii where  
>>> possible
>>> - most downstream consumers of obo files will react unpredictably
>>
>>
>> I would venture to suggest that meanwhile we live in an age in  
>> which i) most programming languages and libraries support  
>> different character encodings perfectly fine (for example,  
>> supporting a non-ASCII character encoding in Java is simply a  
>> matter of passing in an additional argument to the file reader  
>> constructor), and ii) in science we're collaborating globally.  
>> Needing to tell collaborators how they should specify their native- 
>> language names to fit the ASCII limitation doesn't feel that good,  
>> frankly.
>>
>> Also, frankly, I would hate to have to entertain an argument of  
>> OWL/RDF/XML vs OBO on the basis of character encoding support - my  
>> take is that that argument should be unfounded.
>>
>> Maybe there is more involved than just putting an 'encoding' tag  
>> into the header, but it sounds unlikely that it's difficult to  
>> accommodate?
>
> 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.

OK, let's slate this for obof1.3

In the meantime you can start using this header now - it will be  
ignored by existing parsers but should be roundtripped.

> Thanks,
> Jim
>
> ____________________________________________
> James P. Balhoff, Ph.D.
> National Evolutionary Synthesis Center
> 2024 West Main St., Suite A200
> Durham, NC 27705
> USA
>
>