Thread

Re: UNICODE characters above 0x10000

Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> — 2004-08-07T21:43:04Z

On Sat, 2004-08-07 at 07:10, Tom Lane wrote:
> Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> writes:
> > glibc provides various routines (mb...) for handling Unicode.  How many
> > of our supported platforms don't have these?
> 
> Every one that doesn't use glibc.  Don't bother proposing a glibc-only
> solution (and that's from someone who works for a glibc-only company;
> you don't even want to think about the push-back you'll get from other
> quarters).

No. that's not what I was proposing.  My suggestion was to use these
routines if they are sufficiently widely implemented, and our own
routines where standard ones are not available.

The man page for mblen says
"CONFORMING TO
       ISO/ANSI C, UNIX98"

Is glibc really the only C library to conform?

If using the mb... routines isn't feasible, IBM's ICU library
(http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/) is available under the X licence,
which is compatible with BSD as far as I can see.  Besides character
conversion, ICU can also do collation in various locales and encodings. 
My point is, we shouldn't be writing a new set of routines to do half a
job if there are already libraries available to do all of it.

-- 
Oliver Elphick                                          olly@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight                              http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
GPG: 1024D/A54310EA  92C8 39E7 280E 3631 3F0E  1EC0 5664 7A2F A543 10EA
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