FlowDrop Workflow Specification 1.0-draft

Length bounds count characters, never bytes

A limit measured in bytes would depend on the alphabet the author writes in, so the same word would fit one implementation and not another.

The rule

Normative: this is the rule
  1. A string config value shorter than its schema's minLength or longer than its maxLength is refused with R6_CONFIG_INVALID at node.{id}.config.{key}.
  2. Both bounds count Unicode code points, never bytes.

What it means

A length bound is measured against how many code points a string is written in, not how many bytes it takes up. A value that is well within a bound when counted one way can be over it when counted the other, and the two counts diverge exactly for the text a byte-based check would punish hardest: text written outside the single-byte range.

Example

A key's schema requires at least five code points; the value assigned to it is four characters long, eight bytes in a multi-byte encoding:

A schema requiring at least five code points
{"type": "string", "minLength": 5}
The value assigned to that keyrefused
"äöüß"

Four code points is short of the minimum of five, even though the same value is eight bytes long.

Rule identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered. Each implementation publishes its own standing against these rules; this specification does not.spec 1.0-draft · R6.g · changed in spec 1.0