006 How should text values be encoded?
- Status: accepted
- Deciders: partners
Context and Problem Statement
When transfering text values and identifiers it is important to have a common meaning of the character values to avoid wrong presentation to the user and non matching identifiers.
Decision outcome
Arrays of char which represent text values are encoded as UTF-8.
No plausible alternatives were presented.
Pros and Cons of the Options
ASCII or Latin1 Codepage
- Bad, because a limitation to a specific 8-bit charater set does not meet the requirements of modern internationalized software and is not compatible with the OPC-UA specification.
UTF-8
- Good, because not transcoding is needed when sending it to th OPC-UA server.
UTF-16
- Bad, because it consumes more memory.
- Bad, because 16 bit char type is not really compatible.
UTF-32
- Bad, because of even more memory consumption.