best/fastest way to tell if a field contains unicode text?

[Mark Wieder]

Fraser-

Thursday, March 20, 2014, 10:50:28 AM, you wrote:

> One annoyance is that the unicodeText of a field is not, in fact,
> unicode text in the 7.0 engine - it is binary data. Similarly, the
> uniEncode and uniDecode functions convert between two different
> forms of binary data rather than binary data and text. As uniEncode
> and uniDecode do completely the wrong thing as far as 7.0 is
> concerned, they are deprecated and should be replaced with
> textDecode(binary encoding -> text) and textEncode(text -> binary
> encoding). Again, backwards compatibility.

Thanks. Most of that makes sense, but why not alias the deprecated
uni* functions to text* functions rather than just having them return
the wrong thing?

> In 7.0 you should instead say textEncode("hello bucko", "native")
> and you'll get some nice, 8-bit binary data. Or, if you just pass it
> to something that expects binary data (like a file), it'll get
> converted to 8-bit automatically.

The textEncode function does indeed work as expected. I hadn't checked
out the release notes before trying this.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 ahsoftware at gmail.com

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