Re: Unicode programming

[Ken Hornstein <kenh%pobox.com@localhost>]

>What I don't quite get is the unicode stuff you are talking about - why do
>you care about the encoding at all and limit yourself to unicode?

Since you asked ... in my mind there are two particular issues I'm trying
to get my head around.

- I'm going to be getting stuff that won't be in Unicode; it might be in
  iso8859, or koi8-r, on some other encoding.  So I'll need to convert that
  to Unicode.  Optionally, I might need to convert Unicode to some other
  encoding.  There's also the whole pesky issue of what to do when a user's
  locale doesn't indicate that they can support UTF-8.

- So I've got my data in Unicode.  I'll want to do things like output <N>
  characters to the terminal and line wrap at the closest space.
  Please, PLEASE ... I know there's someting like 50 Unicode "space"
  characters ...  remember that I'm basically assuming fixed-width
  fonts inside of an xterm.  Realistically that means that I'm hoping
  to not count combining characters as one character cell, but as zero.

Make sense?

--Ken