On approximately 5/21/2008 1:29 AM, came the following characters from the keyboard of Rafael Garcia-Suarez: > Some way to mark PVs as "binary" and not upgradeable to SvUTF8 would be > handy, though. What's the goal? If, during the lifetime of a binary string, data gets attached to it that makes it get upgraded, and later that data is detached, and the storage format is truly transparent, then when the string is used in a context that needs bytes, it should be handled properly (if not, let's fix that bug), either by downgrading, or by accessing the data and validating that the values are each < 256 (which downgrading does as a side effect). If the goal is to prevent the cost of upgrading and downgrading, well, just fix the bug that attached the upgraded data... and the cost of doing so also vanishes. -- Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/ =========================== A protocol is complete when there is nothing left to remove. -- Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer, regarding Zero Configuration Networking