Re: Will Lua kernel use Unicode in the future?

[Chris Marrin <chris@...>]

Klaus Ripke wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 04:10:26PM -0800, Chris Marrin wrote:
>
> >    "This is a summation character: \226\136\145"
> >
> > and a console that understood UTF8 would show a summation characer. But 
> > to do this I had to:
> >
> > - Use to the Character Map utility to find the character
> > - Copy that character into OpenOffice, which understands Unicode
> > - Save the file as UTF8
> > - Open the file as binary in MsDev
> > - Hand convert the character sequence to UTF8
> > - Use Calculator to convert the result into decimal
> >
> > It would be nice if Lua could do this for me :-)
>
> what should Lua do for you?
> Use to the Character Map utility?
> Copy that character into OpenOffice?
> Or write the one line Lua script to print the decimal
> numbers corresponding to the UTF-8 representation
> of a given Unicode point?
> No problem, Lua does it for you.
> The attached utftab prints 64 chars a line with their
> base Lua string encoding; just add 0-63 to the last \128.
> Run it in a UTF-8 xterm.
> Use ncurses (or some extremely antisocial hacks from slnspider)
> to add mouse support to print the code for any character.
>
> However, your list pretty much makes the point that the problem
> is not whether to write some u+xxx or two or three decimal codes.
> You want to use either an Unicode capable editor
> or some utility to look up codes
> -- as long as everybody agrees to use UTF-8 anyway, that is.
> It does make a big difference though where friends of the wide char
> want their wchar_t based version of Lua. Anybody?

I think UTF8 is a good representation (I used to be in the wchar_t 
camp). The utility of \U is simply convenience, doing the work of 
converting a hex unicode value into UTF8. There are other ways to do it, 
including some Lua code to do the translation.

I think the more important addition would be an easy Lua way to set the 
locale to use the UTF8 encoding.

--
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"As a general rule,don't solve puzzles that open portals to Hell"'