Character Encodings and Livecode fields

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Sun Jan 26 12:31:03 EST 2014


On 26/01/14 19:23, Graham Samuel wrote:
> The first 255 characters on Unicode will occupy double the number of bytes as the first 255 characters of ascii: this means that a transformation has to take place, however trivial (the extra byte in each case is perhaps all zeros - I have not looked at this yet). This is what I call 'promoting' - it transforms a mean and restrictive encoding to a generous and universal one. 'Promotion' seems to me a good word for this transformation. Or one could of course stick to the word 'transformation'.
>
> If you're saying that ascii can become Unicode without any manipulation at all, then I see that I don't understand the basic format of Unicode, which I thought was basically 16 bits (2 bytes) per character. Maybe I am being fooled by my history as a binary bit-twiddler whose experience pre-dates even the word 'byte'. Octal, anyone?
>
> G
>
> On 26 Jan 2014, at 17:23, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't know what you mean by "'promoting' non-Unicode character strings to Unicode; that sounds a bit odd: as far as I know the ASCII
>> set is subsumed as the first 255 chars on Unicode so that is neither here nor there.
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I'm not sure that ALL Unicode chars are double-byte ones; possibly the 
first 255 are not.

And, to be honest, I'm not sure where to check.

Richmond.




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