In the JSON spec, what does "Since the first two characters of a JSON text will always be ASCII characters" mean?
- by dan gibson
The spec is http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt?number=4627
It contains this:
Encoding
JSON text SHALL be encoded in Unicode. The default encoding is
UTF-8.
Since the first two characters of a JSON text will always be ASCII
characters [RFC0020], it is possible to determine whether an octet
stream is UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE or LE), or UTF-32 (BE or LE) by looking
at the pattern of nulls in the first four octets.
What does it mean "Since the first two characters of a JSON text will always be ASCII characters [RFC0020]"? I've looked at RFC0020 but couldn't find anything about it. JSON could be {" or { " (ie whitespace before the quote.