Re: [GD-General] Unicode

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Nov 19, 2003 at 07:55 +0100, Nicolas Romantzoff wrote:
> 
> - MBCS: "Multi Byte Character Sets", using a variable number of
> characters depending on the first one.
> That's exactly the kind of things that drives me nuts: inventing a
> stupid thing for badly engineered older things to continue working. But
> hey, that's life. There, you cannot tell the size of a character,
> however, the system is providing you with functions for that.
> Basically you are ALWAYS pointing to the first byte of the character
> (otherwise everything is broken). Given that byte, you can tell the size
> of the character (mbclen or something like that), incrementing the
> pointer will then give you the next character. Last char is 0.
> Note that it is IMPOSSIBLE to go backward unless you know the string
> first character address.

I believe this is wrong, w/r/t UTF-8.  This is one of its design
features.  You can safely start in the middle of a string, as well as
go backwards.  Though counting characters is not as simple as with
w_char_t or single-byte encodings.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com