Re: [q-lang-users] Q/Qpad 7.8 bug with Unicode on Windows?

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Dear Rob,

> the Unicode support on Windows XP seems to be broken. I've tried using a 
> Unicode source file, but Q will not import it.

That's correct, usage of the BOM (byte order mark) at the beginning of
an UTF-8 file is not portable, and in fact for good reasons many
Unix-compatible tools will choke on it. To quote from the "byte order
mark" Wikipedia article:

"While UTF-8 does not have byte order issues, a BOM encoded in UTF-8 may
be used to mark text as UTF-8. It only identifies a file as UTF-8 and
does not state anything about byte order.[1] Quite a lot of Windows
software (including Windows Notepad) adds one to UTF-8 files. However in
Unix-like systems (which make heavy use of text files for configuration)
this practice is not recommended, as it will interfere with correct
processing of important codes such as the hash-bang at the start of an
interpreted script. It may also interfere with source for programming
languages that don't recognise it."

Maybe there's some option to turn the BOM off in notepad? I haven't checked.

> I've tried Q7.7, and upgraded to Q7.8. The latter behaves slightly 
> worse, as it hangs.

This is the real issue here, thanks for reporting. Apparently the Q 7.8
lexer loops when it tries to read past an illegal UTF-8 character near
eof. I'll fix this asap.

> Qpad doesn't like Unicode files either, but shows the files as 8-bit. (I 
> assume Qpad doesn't support Unicode yet.)

That's also true, and it probably never will (Qpad uses the simple MFC
editor widget which is rather limited and only supports ASCII). As soon
as Qt/Q has been ported to Windows, the current Qpad will probably be
replaced by something portable and much nicer. :)

Thanks,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag