RE: Unicode string handling

> >I have taken the string keywords/parameters as applying to 
> the strings 
> >written to or read from the phone
> 
> As an exmample, you're writing a unicode string to the phone 
> and its physical length is more 'sizeinbytes', how would you 
> truncate the string/value/field?

You would truncate it until it fits the size available, the byte length is
the limiting factor not the number of characters.
I have implemented it to work this way at the moment if you look at the
_update function.
Also python has interesting behavior with the 'len' of byte srings, it
returns the number of bytes not characters, for unicode strings it returns
the number of characters.

> >There is a problem at the moment with handling terminators 
> of more than 
> >one byte
> 
> Untill this issue is addressed, current handling of unicode 
> strings will not work in all cases.

None of the phones use more than a single byte for terminating characters
afaik, so the limitation is theoretical, it was also present before I made
any changes.
Conversion to unicode has always happened in bitpim, the changes to the
string class move it to a different point in the code, the advantage to the
doing it this way is that we can now control the character set used for the
converstion.

> >If maintaining compatability with existing code is most important
> 
> IMHO, I think it is just because we may not have access to 
> all the phones implemented in BitPim to easily make (and 
> test) any updates.

I think the safest way to do this would be to deprecate the STRING class and
leave it untouched and introduce a new one for unicode support. We would
then be able to migrate the existing code over as time allowed.
It would be possible to add the graceful degrade to ascii feature to the
existing STRING class without significant risk, its just a one or two line
change.

I see your point about backward compatability, it will not take long to add
a separate class. Anyone object?


Simon



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