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

[Hans Hübner]

Dave,

sorry to be harsh, but the problem here is that you don't understand
external formats and how they relate to characters.  Most modern Lisps
use Unicode as their character set, and most of them represent
characters as 16 or 32 bit integers internally.  UTF-8, contrasted to
that, is an external encoding scheme for Unicode characters, and
again, most Lisps support reading and writing characters in UTF-8
encoding.

The external format of files read and written is usually specified
using the :external-format keyword argument to functions like OPEN,
WITH-OPEN-FILE etc.  Also, there are portability libraries like BABEL
that can be helpful to convert Lisp strings to arbitary external
formats, for example when calling foreign functions or reading and
writing binary files.

CL-PPCRE uses Lisp characters and strings and works with Unicode
characters just fine.  The CL-UNICODE library is a portability library
for working with Unicode directly, but most users never really need to
do that.

Please read up on external formats in your Lisp implementation's manual.

-Hans

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 19:09, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/7/24 Edi Weitz <edi at agharta.de>:
>
>> I think you are confused.  In Lisp, characters and strings are really
>> characters and strings.
>
>>  CL-USER 6 > (char-name **)
>>  "Latin-Small-Letter-A-With-Diaeresis"
>
> Sorry ** doesn't look like u00e4
>
>
>
>>
>> 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/
>
> I don't want to convert, I want to read utf-8 from a file,
> work in 'characters', build them into strings
> and write them back to file, in utf-8
>
>
>
>
>>> Any reason lisp should not enjoy that level of internationalisation?
>>
>> It does already.
>
>
> seems we have a different definition of 'working'.
>
> regards
>
>
>
> --
> Dave Pawson
> XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
> http://www.dpawson.co.uk
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