Re: [Audacity-devel] non-ascii labels

[Stuart <smc...@fr...>]

"Leland" wrote:
[...snip...]
> > When I export the labels, then import them, they are imported
> > correctly.  The labels file encoding also appears to be cp-932.
> > 
> We're just getting lucky with this one since we expect the start and end
> times to be in plain ASCII and allow the label test to be in Unicode.

With most (nearly all?) encodings, the ascii letters, digits, and
basic punctuation is the same values as in ascii I think, so if its 
lucky, its predictably lucky.  But, yes, it would be better to do it 
right.
If by unicode you mean, UTF-8, I think that would be fine.  Isn't
it pretty straight forward to encode the output data before writing
it to the file?  (He says glibbly without looking at the code. :-)
If you mean UCS-2 or UCS-4, I think that would be less desireable
due to byte order and BOM issues.  And using system default 
encoding (which would result in byte-for-byte identical files that 
are produced now in most (all?) cases is not horrible either, 
although it does have portability issues.  

> A couple of us were tossing around the idea of changing the label export to
> write XML files instead.  But, we'll have to hold off on that until we
> figure out how we're going to handle Unicode in the various XML files we
> create.

In my current use of Audacity, the label file *is* the work product.
I have tools that read the label files into a database, so that the 
labeled audio clips can be analyzed, played, correlated, and 
otherwise used by other tools.  So I hope you don't consider 
label files to be purely a persistence mechanism for Audacity.
While I can process XML files without a big problem it will mean 
including xml libraries, more complex code, etc.  Not a huge burden, 
but the file structure of label files is so simple I wonder if using xml 
is really worthwhile.  (Of course you may have plans for introducing 
more capabilities and a more complex structure,,,)

I am surprised (probably an indication of my ignorance) that unicode
in xml presents a problem.  Is that not why the default encoding for
xml files is utf-8?  The alternative would be to use the default
system encoding (double-byte cp932 on my system) as is done
now but just include an encoding line in the xml file.  But I admit
to being totally mysified by double-byte vs unicode in windows
so please take this comment more as an expression of my 
ignorance than a suggestion! :-)