Subject: PI: 04: Alphanumeric Identifier Match

From: "Manger, James H" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 12:46:08 +1000

Is the Alphanumeric Identifier Match described in the Permanent Identifier
draft a new rule, or is it specified elsewhere?  [draft-ietf-pkix-pi-04.txt,
line 201, section 2, page 4]

It looks like a good default rule for matching string identifiers.  However,
the text is not specific about exactly which characters are considered
control characters, spaces and punctuation marks.  Excluding all characters
for which either of the standard C functions isspace() or ispunct() return
true might be a reasonable way to define the rule (I am not sure if
excluding control characters is sensible).  It should be clear that minus
signs must be excluded.

> ----------
> From:	Denis Pinkas [SMTP:[email-masked]]
> Sent:	Friday, 14 June 2002 12:30 am
> Subject:	Re: WG Last Call: Permanent Identifier
> 
	..
> The revised draft has been placed on the IETF server and is available
> from:
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pkix-pi-04.txt
>

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From: "Tom Gindin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 08:06:05 -0400

James:

      The matching rule is a new one, and does not currently have an OID.
The elimination of control characters is intended particularly so that
horizontal tab will be ignored.  Most control characters will never appear
in such a value, of course.
      In English, the only characters which should be compared using this
rule are upper-case letters, lower-case letters, and digits.  Among others,
period and underscore, as well as hyphen, should be omitted from the
comparison.  The reason we did not go into detail on what constitutes each
character class was that this can become a complex subject in an
internationalized environment.  For Latin alphabet languages, the C
expression ispunct(ch) | iscntrl (ch) | isspace(ch) is an adequate summary
of what was omitted, although it might be easier to define it as
!isalnum(ch).
      I'll try to prepare better wording for this.  A first try would be to
replace the "stripping text" (from "by stripping" up to the semicolon) by
"by including only digits and alphabetic characters".  We'll probably need
to run this past some I18N specialist to see whether that's reasonable for
languages with diacritical marks and for ideographic ones.  I'd be willing
to not cover ideographic languages if it is not feasible to do so, but
there should be a form for languages with diacritical marks.  If they need
a separate rule, that's OK too.

            Tom Gindin

"Manger, James H" <[email-masked]>@mail.imc.org on
06/13/2002 10:46:08 PM

Sent by:    [email-masked]

To:    pkix <[email-masked]>
cc:
Subject:    PI: 04: Alphanumeric Identifier Match

Is the Alphanumeric Identifier Match described in the Permanent Identifier
draft a new rule, or is it specified elsewhere?
[draft-ietf-pkix-pi-04.txt,
line 201, section 2, page 4]

It looks like a good default rule for matching string identifiers.
However,

             ..