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

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From: Joerg Mayer <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 03:14:46 +0100
On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 01:28:40AM -0800, Guy Harris wrote:
> 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.

I have changed that to use a separate ssid-buffer for printing.

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

I haven't done so as I really think it makes the output rather ugly and
longer and in most cases doesn't add any useable information. If you feel
differently let me know and I'll change it to 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.).

It's not a nice set of choices we have here, so I just chose the one which
seemed to fit my needs best :)
If I chose to use my name with the o-umlaut as an ssid, it is nice to still
be able to read the rest of the ssid as plain text. Same goes for other
west european alphabets. In case the encoding is not ascii (or latin1/15 or
UTF-8) we have no real means of finding out what it is - so in case someone
in China decides to use her name as SSID - that's fine too but I don't think
printing it as a hex string in the COLINFO field would be helpful (things
are getting too long).

  Ciao
       Joerg

-- 
Joerg Mayer                                           <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that
works. Some say that should read Microsoft instead of technology.