Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] packet-ieee80211 add SSID to info column, also added wlan TAP

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 01:28:40 -0800
Joerg Mayer wrote:
On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 08:43:28AM -0800, Giles Scott wrote:

Added printing of SSID in 'info column'. As WinXP tends to put rubbish
in the Probe-request have to check to make sure the SSID is printable
hence 'isallprintable' function.

I added this feature to svn yesterday.

The raw value of the SSID, rather than the version filtered for printable characters, should probably be what's added to the protocol tree - the code for displaying string values will filter out non-printables when displaying.

A filtered version should be put into the Info column, using "format_text()".

However, if there are non-printables, should it filter them out - or should it assume it's binary, not text, and:

	1) put it into the Info column as a hex string;

2) possibly add it as an FT_BINARY field rather than as an FT_STRING field, so we have two "tag interpretation" fields - or perhaps add a new type that acts like FT_BINARY but

		1) can be compared against a text string *or* a byte string

and

2) displays as a text string if all characters are printable and as a byte string otherwise.

Also, what should the definition of "printable" be? "Printable ASCII" would work with all ASCII-derived encodings, but wouldn't handle non-ASCII text characters; other schemes would have to know the character encoding (ISO 8859/n, various EUC codes, UTF-8, etc.).