[PD] request for objections: any2string -> unsigned char

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jan 17, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Martin Peach wrote:

> Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>> On Sat, 17 Jan 2009, Bryan Jurish wrote:
>>
>>> OK.  I guess I'll make unsigned values the default for [any2string]
>>> then, postponing the issue of name change to [any2bytes] rsp.
>>> [bytes2any] to a hypothetical future in which the "string" suffix
>>> implies unicode or other non-byte-oriented representation.
>>
>> Make an alias to [any2bytes] anyway, and encourage people to make the
>> distinction right away, so that [any2string] in the future would take
>> care of encodings while [any2bytes] would not.
>>
>> Or else, [any2string] could take an argument for the charset, maybe.
>>
>
> Am I missing something here? How does one make a symbol or a message  
> or
> anything at all in pd using for example chinese or arabic characters?
> I thought it was ASCII all the way, and even then there are reserved
> characters that get snagged by tcl.
>
> The term 'string' seems to have two separate meanings in this thread.
> One designates a string of text, for presentation. The other  
> designates
> a string of bytes, for transmission. I think [any2string] is intended
> for purposes of serialization, to send data through a byte-oriented
> channel such as a serial port, ethernet, or file.
>
> Maybe for text an [any2symbol] is what is needed. It would convert  
> text
> in any encoding to a valid pd symbol. The symbol could then be passed
> through [any2string] to get the raw bytes.
>
> Martin


I think Pd just filters { } \ and all other characters go thru... kind  
of.  Latin1 definitely works, and I've seen some other characters work  
in Pd patches.  This is one goal of the current pd-devel effort:  
removing arbitrary ASCII restrictions.  Tcl/Tk is unicode, so I don't  
think it would be too hard to make Pd fully Unicode, if someone wanted  
to take that on.  Having the GUI pure Tcl should make that easier.

.hc




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