[wpa_supplicant] essid with non-ascii characters

[Jouni Malinen]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 02:42:42PM +0200, LuX wrote:
> According to manuals (and Arch Linux's wiki) the typical way of using
> wpa_supplicant consists in creating a /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file and
> applying wpa_supplicant to it.

I see.. You may find Arch Linux users in minority, but sure, I know
there are people doing this. I'm just assuming that such users are
aware of different ways of encoding non-ASCII characters. For more
common use case, Network Manager or Android Wi-Fi framework takes care
of copying SSID from the scan results to the network configuration
block.

> 1) Advertise them in the man page of wpa_supplicant. 

Well.. The man page included in hostap.git does not even mention SSID,
so this may be more appropriate to whatever external document is
pointing out wpa_supplicant.conf to be created manually.

> 2) If it doesn't exist, create an intermediate tool between iwlist and
> wpa_supplicant in order to build from the output of a scan a
> pre-version of wpa_supplicant.conf (to be continued by the user for
> passphrases and so on, but with an 'essid' field already completed,
> with the correct encoding).

iwlist should not really be promoted anymore, but I guess it would be
possible to add an optional display mode for "iw scan dump" to show
entries in a form that could be copied to wpa_supplicant.conf (just need
to be careful not to change the encoding of the non-ASCII characters as
part of this effort).

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA