NX (Contractors): Encoding instructions unclear?

[David Lindquist]

Hello Everyone,
When describing the data format, the instructions state:

All text values, and all fields (which are text only), contain only 8 bit characters, null terminated if less than the maximum length for the field. The character encoding is 8 bit US ASCII.

US ASCII is a 7-bit encoding. Should I be using ISO 8859 instead?
Also, when I do a hexdump of the db file I get the following:

 
$ hexdump -C db-2x1.db
...
00000150  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 50 61  |              Pa|
00000160  69 6e 74 69 6e 67 2c 20  41 69 72 20 43 6f 6e 64  |inting, Air Cond|
00000170  69 74 69 6f 6e 69 6e 67  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |itioning        |
...
 

It shows that fields are space terminated (0x20) and not null terminated (0x00). I assume that the instructions are using "null terminated" loosely, but I just want to make sure I am not overlooking something critical. How did you all interpret this?

[David Lindquist]

Whoops, sorry folks. I should have done a search on this topic before I posted. I just found a plethora of previous posts discussing this.

[Vlad Rabkin]

Hi,
There is a standard encoding "US-ASCII", which is supported by standard jdk.

It shows that fields are space terminated (0x20) and not null terminated (0x00). I assume that the instructions are using "null terminated" loosely, but I just want to make sure I am not overlooking something critical. How did you all interpret this?

Take a look at the thread in the past.
There several solutions:
Some people have just ignored issue with null-terminated string, some did it, since it is still valid operation to save a record containing space charachters (e.g. client sends update request isntead of "abc" , "abc ".
I save records filled with blanks on the rest, but if built in a parser for read in case an other programm writes null-terminated string in the data file.
Vlad