Setting the encoding in the basic auth header

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> When I enter character \xf1 as the username which is outside ascii but
> within iso-8859-1
> 
> Firefox 2.0 sends this as \xf1
> IE 7 also sends this as \xf1
> But the utf-8 encoding is \xc3\xb1
> 
> If I enter character 0BA4 (TAMIL LETTER TA) which is outside
> iso-8859-1
> 
> Firefox 2 sends this as \xa4 (seems to drop the high byte)
> IE 7 sends this as ?
> 
> It seems that both browsers are using the iso-8859-1 charset. Is there
> any way I can get them to encode the data with utf-8 instead?

Looking at your results, the answer seems to be "no". They don't use
Latin-1, instead, they use Unicode and just drop the row byte, sending
only the cell byte (independent on whether the input was Latin-1).

RFC 2617 specifies userid as *TEXT, without ever specifying what TEXT
is. Most likely, the authors of that specification did not consider
encodings.

Regards,
Martin