Lua interpreter and Lua files encoding

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

Hi List!

For some weeks I've been playing with Lua and LaTeX. More specifically I 
use Lua to generate LaTeX files.

Since I need to generate LaTeX files encoded in utf8, the Lua files used 
to generate them are utf8 too, so I can embed fragments of utf8 text in 
string literals, which I then assemble to build the final LaTeX file.

I never had any problem with this approach by now, but having struggled 
for a while with LaTeX input/font encoding mess, I was struck by a 
doubt: does the Lua interpreter really support utf8? And to what extent? 
Or I was only lucky because my string literals didn't contained fancy 
unicode chars, but only accented latin letters? I also did some testing 
embedding arabic chars in Lua literals and they showed up correctly in 
LaTeX files, so it seems it works.

I know that Lua in itself isn't Unicode compliant, but does the 
interpreter behave well if the only non-ASCII Unicode chars are in 
string literals (and in comments sometimes)? Is it a guaranteed behaviour?

I didn't found anything in the manual in this respect (beside the fact 
that Lua is 8-bit clean). I also searched the mailing list archive, but 
didn't find a definitive answer.

I begin to fear that I'm relying on undefined behaviour!

Thanks in advance for any explanation.

--
Lorenzo