<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hey folks - <div>this is an extremely esoteric question for anyone using the blurb service from outside of a browser or ACRE. If you don't care that much about unicode, or always use a browser or ACRE, this shouldn't affect you at all.</div><div><br><div>we're trying to address a vaguery in our blurb API, and hoping to get input from anyone who uses the "blurb" service.</div><div><br></div><div>In particular, there is a parameter called "maxlength", which is defined in the documentation as:</div><div><strong>maxlength</strong>: maximum number of characters in the blurb, default is <strong>200</strong></div><div><b><br></b></div><div>but what this does not indicate is, what kind of characters. In particular, is this unicode characters or 8-bit bytes? This service typically returns UTF-8 which is a variable length character encoding such that non-ASCII characters may be represented with 2 or more actually bytes.</div><div><br></div><div>Up until recently, the implementation was "maximum number of 8-bit encoded characters" but due to some internal code refactoring, the meaning became "maximum number of unicode characters"</div><div><br></div><div>In particular what this means is that when you ask for a maxlength of, say, 200, and there are non-ASCII bytes in the original article/blurb, they will get expanded into multi-byte characters and you may potentially get, say, 212 bytes back. Those 212 bytes may expand out to exactly 200 unicode characters, but the response size is still greater than the maxlength that you passed in.</div><div><br></div><div>This seems like the right behavior to me, but I wanted to run it by anyone on the list to see if this behavior would mess anyone up.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Alec</div></div></body></html>