[cl-ppcre-devel] New CL-UNICODE release 0.1.1

[Edi Weitz]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:39:40 +0100, "Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson at gmail.com> wrote:

> xml has long dealt with 'strings of characters' encoded in utf-8.

I think you are confused.  In Lisp, characters and strings are really
characters and strings.

  CL-USER 4 > #\ä
  #\ä

  CL-USER 5 > (type-of *)
  CHARACTER

  CL-USER 6 > (char-name **)
  "Latin-Small-Letter-A-With-Diaeresis"

If you want to convert between octets and characters (that's where
encodings like UTF-8 make sense), most CL implementations have
facilities for this out of the box.  For portable solutions see for
example here:

  http://weitz.de/flexi-streams/
  http://common-lisp.net/project/babel/

> That way I can include an umlaut, an arabic glyph or a chinese
> symbol

See above.

> Any reason lisp should not enjoy that level of internationalisation?

It does already.

HTH,
Edi.