[bind10-dev] arbitrary character and plain char

[Robert Edmonds]

JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉 wrote:
> The following are what I tried to explain in the today's loader
> discussion:
> 
> RFC1035 states: "The labels in the domain name are expressed as
> character strings and separated by dots.  Quoting conventions allow
> arbitrary characters to be stored in domain names."
> 
> It's not clear to me whether it allows a domain name in a master files
> contain a 8-bit character value of , e.g. 255, not using the special
> encoding of \255.

also RFC 1035:

    Because these files are text files several special encodings are
    necessary to allow arbitrary data to be loaded.

    [...]
    \DDD            where each D is a digit is the octet corresponding to
                    the decimal number described by DDD.  The resulting
                    octet is assumed to be text and is not checked for
                    special meaning.
    [...]

the first sentence seems relatively clear (provided definitions of "text
file" and "arbitrary data") but i'm not quite sure what that last
sentence means exactly.

-- 
Robert Edmonds
edmonds at isc.org