[NSIS-Bugs] [ nsis-Feature Requests-2084797 ] New constants to specify special characters in strings.

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Feature Requests item #2084797, was opened at 2008-08-30 23:27
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by anders_k
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Category: Scripting
Group: None
>Status: Closed
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Assigned to: Amir Szekely (kichik)
Summary: New constants to specify special characters in strings.

Initial Comment:
To go with the constants that can be used in strings, ($$, $\r, $\n, $\t), I suggest a set of constants that allow you to specify special ASCII characters in a string. It would be of the form "$\x__", where __ is a hexadecimal number between 00 (0) and FF (255).
For example, "$\x99" would display the trade mark sign (ASCII 153).

Sort of related: I would also like to see the curly single and double quotes (ASCII 145, 146, 147 and 148) be allowed to be used interchangably with the regular quote characters (', " and `). As pointless as this would be to a lot of people, it would allow someone to "beautify" their script, which I often like to do...

Thanks.

Brad.

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>Comment By: Anders (anders_k)
Date: 2013-04-03 16:08

Message:
${U+1}...${U+FFFFFFFF} are now treated as a Unicode codepoint.

ASCII ends at 127, dealing with quotes outside basic ASCII would be a pain
in makensis because our strings are now wchar_t* internally and wchar_t is
compiler specific...

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Comment By: Michael Madsen (pidgeot)
Date: 2008-09-06 05:32

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The quotes (U+2018, U+2019, U+201C, U+201D) would indeed be an issue when
developing the install script on systems with different codepages, since
their values are > U+0080 - but it is, of course, not an issue at run-time.
Because of that, such a change (if implemented at all) should probably be
deferred that until Jim's Unicode branch is merged into trunk.

Thinking forward, the first part also has issues. The $\x syntax, although
allowing for compile-time substitution, would either require a change when
migrating to Unicode, or some kind of clever parsing where you prefix with
00 if you want a Unicode character X where U+007F < X < U+0100 - but even
that might not work as intended, since I might have $\xA92008 - in an ANSI
script on a Western European codepage, that would result in ©2008. In
Unicode, parsing that would result in ꤠ08 (KAYAH LI LETTER VA, U+A920).

IntFmt is actually slightly worse, because unlike the $\x syntax, you can't
necessarily determine the output at compile-time, and even if you could, it
has the same ANSI/Unicode value mismatch issue. It would, however, be
easier to go beyond the BMP (U+10000 and up)

A better solution, in my opinion is to just inline the character at leave
it at that. It's trivial to start up Character Map (Start > Run > charmap)
and find what you need, and it requires less work when migrating to
Unicode.

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Comment By: Amir Szekely (kichik)
Date: 2008-09-05 05:04

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You can use IntFmt %c for the first part.

As for the quotes, wouldn't that pose a problem with different codepages?

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