[PD-dev] pool files: UTF-8 encoding

[Bryan Jurish]

morning Thomas, Hans-Christoph, and list,

On 2006-11-30 03:20:56, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org> appears to
have written:
> locales is the library and tool that handles that stuff, IIRC.  You'll
> want to look into the env vars LANG, LC_ALL, etc.  I think that's
> supposed to be system-wide, but with all those grabbag distros based on
> the Linux kernel, you never know who implemented what and how in their bit.

afaik, locale.h doesn't handle any character set translation; it just
ensures that isalpha() & co. work sensibly.  there's also no guarantee
that the current input and/or display modes will conform to the value of
$LANG, but i agree that $LANG is probably the safest information source
for the user's preferred encoding.

> On Nov 29, 2006, at 4:37 PM, Thomas Grill wrote:
>> Is there an API function to query this encoding

i don't know which function(s) to use, but you might also look at the
"registry" and "encoding" fields of the currently selected X font.

>> is there a system function to convert from/to UTF-8?

i don't think there's anything like a universally applicable system
function guaranteed to work everywhere, but i use librecode for
character set translation on linux.  i've also heard good reports about
iconv, but have never used it directly myself.

marmosets,
  Bryan

-- 
Bryan Jurish                           "There is *always* one more bug."
jurish at ling.uni-potsdam.de      -Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology