Re: Changing the char type in 5.0.2

[Tiago Dionizio <tngd81@...>]

Reuben Thomas wrote:

> I was just wondering what the current state of the art is on changing 
> the char type. I have found LuaPlus, but that has a lot of extra 
> baggage; ideally I'd just like to change Lua's char type to wide 
> character.
>
> Anyone done this?
It may not be what you want but, some time ago i made a small library to 
handle utf8 strings with an interface similar to the string library 
provided by lua. The interface is the same (except for string.dump) and 
all returned strings are *userdata* objects, representing utf8 strings 
that can be passed to the ustring functions or even use its metatable 
(which is ustring itself). You can create new utf8 strings with the 
command "us = ustring.new('string')" or just pass normal strings to the 
functions; these values will be automaticly converted to its internal 
representation. After that you can use normal operations on it 
"us:len()" etc. To get back to the lua string type, use "tostring(us)" 
or "us:cstr()". Normal string comparison also works. Implicit convertion 
to lua strings can also happen through its metatable __tostring function.

The drawbacks:
   it is not a "primitive" type, it is not the same as a lua string.
   whenever an utf8 string is used it is converted from utf8 to wide 
character string internaly (not visible from lua)

http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~tngd/lua/lustring-0.1.tar.gz
(as you will notice, there isn't any kind of information apart from the 
description i am giving on this email)

Tested it on linux and win32 using gcc/mingw.

Hope it helps.
Tiago