Re: zinf and utf8

On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 18:29, Kristian G. Kvilekval wrote:

> Internally, everything is US-ASCII.   There are several points
> where conversions are made (vorbis, id3tag, etc).  Of course,
> in usual style each uses its own set of conversion routines.
> One day I'll go back and clean out that part of the garage too.

That is untrue, I think. ASCII (using only 7bits per char), is a subset
of utf8. In other words any valid ascii string is valid in utf8. Now I
have mp3's by Björk and Saint-Saëns, amongst others, which contain
"funny" characters, which when displayed in my gtk2 based zinf gives an
error. This is because they are encoded in some kind of extended ascii
(prob. ISO-8859-1) which uses 8bits per character.

> I have no idea what this would entail.   Can you point me to a program
> that uses UTF8 internally.   What about constant strings, gettext
> internalization, and string manipulation commands.

Well, utf8 is designed to be as compatible as possible with ascii, but
you can't assume that 1 character equals one byte, because it uses a
variable amount of storage per character. So for example you can't
iterate through the character in a string just by incrementing a
pointer, etc. 

> We push so few strings to the display that it might be just as easy
> to do the conversions on the fly.

hmm, so when I add 5000 files to a playlist, with the musicbrowser
showing artist, album, title, genre, location, that's what 25,000
strings output in one go....

I guess I'll just try it and see what happens.

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