Re: [Chicken-users] ditching syntax-case modules for the utf8 egg

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

On 18 Mar 2008, at 2:29 am, Alex Shinn wrote:

> The problems we're having aren't even about string
> representation though, they're about the semantics of the
> string operations themselves.  Are the string indices byte
> positions or character positions?  Different libraries
> disagree.


IMHO Java does it more or less right (falls down on the details,
though; tends to assume that one UTF16 code = 1 character, sigh).

As in, you have a byte type, and a char type, and never the twain
shall meet, except that String (a wrapper around a char array with
stringy operations defined) has an encode method that takes an
encoding name and returns a byte array, and a constructor that takes
a byte array and an encoding name. There's versions, too, that don't
take an encoding name, and then use the "platform default
encoding" (eg, on UNIX, it looks up the locale and works from that).

So when you read from a file, you get bytes, but if you ask, they'll
be converted to characters, etc.

ABS

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Alaric Snell-Pym
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