Unicode and chunk expressions

[pkc]

Hi Thomas, I'm not sure what you want to do with these chunk expressions, but my success at following Devin's suggestion to use Unicode by moving it into and out of html conversions causes me to ask:

Is it possible to do what you want by simply using the resultant ascii text and manipulating it as one would normally do (filters, instructions, comparison, etc)?  

Setting normal input text (depending on your method) to Unicode and then converting to htmlText (which comes and goes as ascii) would seem to make all normal transcript powers available.  Just turning it over in my mind, I'm not sure what you want to do with Unicode that would not be available by converting it to and from ascii.

Using UTF-8 appears to open some new additional functions that would not be available in a normal "useUnicode" environment.  However, it is unlikely that UTF-8 will produce something stable enough to come through without problems in your final build.  UTF-16 is a better ultimate mediu, but with the ability to move from unicode to html to ascii and all the way back again, you can start and end with UTF-16 (or start with GB5 and end up with UTF-16 if you want), which seems to me to work very well.  That is: input characters with your normal method, get everything to ascii codes for your internal app operation, and have unicode (UTF-16) come out again at the user's end.