Unicode, the clipboard and LC fields

[Richmond]

On 22/01/14 20:41, Graham Samuel wrote:
> Richmond, thanks for inching my problem towards a solution. I downloaded your test.

> Clever, in fact too clever for me.

Possibly, but NOT clever enough . . .

I would like an easy way to know what character encoding is being used 
in a textField:

NOT just whether it is Unicode or Not:

There are all sorts of variable such as

fontLanguage  [I have never quite worked out how that jives with Unicode],

MacCyrillic,

and so on, ad nauseam.

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For the sake of argument, and at the risk of repeating myself:

I managed to resurrect a 120 page 'thing' of my wife's, written in mixed 
English and Bulgarian on
Mac OS 9 when Mac OS 9 was all the rage.

In the end . . . after a lot of blood, sweat, tears and incredibly 
coarse remarks, I manged to turn it into
a PDF with an embedded text layer .  . . allowing, at least, the English 
to be directly transferred into an ODT
document.

However my wife will still have the "joy" of having to retype all the 
Bulgarian and all the other bits of text
in various other languages, because they were initially typed on Mac OS 
9 in the "funny ways" Mac did
things then which are not the same as the "funny ways" (a.k.a. Unicode) 
we do things now.

Had I had a stack that allowed me to import the document, or copy-paste 
the text, and then been able to tell
me the encodings of the various bits (chunks) so I could have run them 
through some merry little algorhythms,
life would have been considerably more refreshing.

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Now, I know the argument about Livecode not being a jollified 
word-processor that was trotted out when I made a few
comments about Supercard having ways of doing paragraphing and so on.

And, Livecode may NOT be a jollified word-processor; but if it is meant 
to be a computer programming language
rather than a simplified subset of one, it should have the wherewithall 
for programmers to build a word-processor
without recourse to outside resources. That means (quite apart from 
paragraph breaks, which can be easily arranged in Livecode)
the ability to recognise and tell the programmer all sorts of 
tex-encoding standards.

-----------

Now Graham's "Clever" is jolly gratifying, but, frankly, comparing 2 
textFields in not very clever,
and, while that can differentiate between ASCII text and Unicode text 
that is as far as it goes.

---------

My latest riff is to have a command of the sort:

put textEncoding

and something of the sort 'plainText', 'RTFtext', 'htmlText', 
'unicodeText' will be output as a result.

And then, for those who really go a bundle on this kind of thing, we 
might extend that to 'UTF8', 'UTF16', 'UTF32' and so forth.

Richmond.