Re: Some groundwork for Unicode in Zle

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Fran=E7ois-Xavier?= Coudert wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm new to the list but I'm interested in UTF-8 inclusion into Zle. My
> question is the following: have you considered the possibility of keeping
> storing strings like the line edited in arrays of char (and not wide
> chars), while using a few functions to handle the fact that one Unicode
> character may be represented by a few chars (and one glyph by a few
> Unicode characters, but I'm not sure how this can be handled).

This works well inside the main shell --- we use something similar with
a "Meta" character to quote characters special to the shell.  This will
probably continue.

In the line editor, being able to access a character by index is fairly
fundamental.  Having to count every time we need to access a location
would be a big change.  It's better to have an array of the right type.
In other places we will need to pass a wchar_t or even a wint_t, but
this is better than having a multibyte string for every character.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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