What's new

Add emoji support in SSID?

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

Alives

New Around Here
When I try to set an emoji SSID, I get the error: "SSID cannot contain the character ...".

Would it be possible to support setting emoji SSIDs?
 
That would mean all devices showing the SSID name would have to support emoji's or at least support these characters as a valid name. There are more important things than changing software/firmware for billions of devices just to satisfy one user.
 
An SSID is a string of 31 or 32 bytes. The common way of interpreting the data is as ASCII characters, but there nothing stopping you from inputting a multi-byte Unicode Emoji.

Though, that emoji you input will be interpreted as ASCII characters by clients. Like, let's say the Emoji is a single, 4-byte Unicode character, a client will instead see four, 1-byte ASCII characters.
 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_set_(802.11_network)#Service_set_identification_.28SSID.29

A common, albeit incorrect assumption, is that an SSID is a string of human-readable characters (such as ASCII), terminated by a NUL character (as in a C-string). SSIDs must be treated and handled as what they are, a series of 0 to 32 octets, some of which may not be human-readable. Note that the 2012 version of the 802.11 standard defines a primitive SSIDEncoding, an Enumeration of UNSPECIFIED and UTF-8, indicating how the array of octets can be interpreted.
 
An SSID is a string of 31 or 32 bytes. The common way of interpreting the data is as ASCII characters, but there nothing stopping you from inputting a multi-byte Unicode Emoji.

Though, that emoji you input will be interpreted as ASCII characters by clients. Like, let's say the Emoji is a single, 4-byte Unicode character, a client will instead see four, 1-byte ASCII characters.

the problem is - many clients will interpret that bit string in different ways...

There is a clear reason why things are what they are - the world is very cross-platform these days...

In the words of Maximus (Movie::Gladiator) - stay the line
 
the problem is - many clients will interpret that bit string in different ways...

There is a clear reason why things are what they are - the world is very cross-platform these days...

In the words of Maximus (Movie::Gladiator) - stay the line

In theory, all backend (wpa_supplicant, for example) WiFi services should treat an SSID as 32 bytes of binary data.

If there is a problem, it would be purely a GUI problem (which should be unimportant). In many asian locales SSID's use non-ascii characters.
 
In theory, all backend (wpa_supplicant, for example) WiFi services should treat an SSID as 32 bytes of binary data.

If there is a problem, it would be purely a GUI problem (which should be unimportant). In many asian locales SSID's use non-ascii characters.

In theory yes, but in the practical world - no...

Seriously - most AP's are linux/bsd based, and that string is US-ASCII...

I'll do a mic drop as there isn't much further to discuss here... boom, echo/ring...
 
In theory yes, but in the practical world - no...

Seriously - most AP's are linux/bsd based, and that string is US-ASCII...

I'll do a mic drop as there isn't much further to discuss here... boom, echo/ring...

According to the latest 802.11 standard, an SSID is a 32-byte string that either uses an "UNSPECIFIED" or "UTF8" character encoding. ASCII is not an official SSID character encoding, but UTF8 (which is backwards compatible with ASCII) is... and UTF8 is fully capable of expressing Emojis.

Linux & *BSD have supported Unicode/UTF-8 for over a decade, which includes all(?) current AsusWRT Linux kernels.
 
because it's not - i know you like to push the issue... but sometimes you gotta admit, things are what they are...

no emojis in SSID's...
 
because it's not - i know you like to push the issue... but sometimes you gotta admit, things are what they are...

no emojis in SSID's...

My point is that OP's request is valid within the (latest) 802.11 spec. Whether or not it is currently supported...

If there is a section of the 802.11 spec that disallows Emojis, please share it.
 
If there is a section of the 802.11 spec that disallows Emojis, please share it.

look at it this way , consider the lowest common denominator , where only the use of lower and upper case and numbers is accepted but some clients and devices , so these clients wont work , the likes of tp link only support lower / upper case and numbers , so to ensure cross compatibility you always go with the lowest common denominator its that simple
 
Just for fun...CJK mixed with emoji on Asus wireless router.

trumpet ssid.png


(Nullity seems right here...)
 
look at it this way , consider the lowest common denominator , where only the use of lower and upper case and numbers is accepted but some clients and devices , so these clients wont work , the likes of tp link only support lower / upper case and numbers , so to ensure cross compatibility you always go with the lowest common denominator its that simple

I understand the current situation, but I will not endorse blatant disregard for an established standard without good reason.

I think you confuse binary representation (the SSID spec) with ~alphabetical representation (ASCII).
 
I understand the current situation, but I will not endorse blatant disregard for an established standard without good reason.

I think you confuse binary representation (the SSID spec) with ~alphabetical representation (ASCII).

True - but practical considerations need to account for different operating systems, some of which may or may not support extended character sets - and while SSID shouldn't be something used by strcpy (and it's friends), some clients may do it.

Be safe out there...
 

Similar threads

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top