From: Michael Selig <michael.selig@...>
Date: 2009-02-23T07:35:41+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:22338] Re: [Feature #908] Should be an easy way  of reading N characters from am I/O stream

On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 03:00:41 +1100, Tanaka Akira <akr@fsij.org> wrote:

> In article <6.0.0.20.2.20090220134502.0823ee98@localhost>,
>   Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp> writes:
>
>> Can you give more specific explanations of why reading a number
>> of characters might not be secure?
>
> I considered ISO-2022-JP, Unicode combining characters and
> Punycode.
>
> In these encodings, fixed number of characters doesn't limit
> the number of bytes.

Sure, but how does that make it "insecure"?

> However they may not cause problem now because Ruby doesn't
> support combining characters, etc.  But Ruby's encoding
> system is extensible.  It is possible to define an encoding
> which makes the character-wise limit insecure.

Sorry, I do not really understand what you mean by the word "insecure".  
Perhaps you could explain what you mean in more detail.
Also I still do not understand why you say the character limit might be  
"insecure". Can you give an example, please?

Regards
Mike