Re: question about Unicode

[Matt Campbell <mattc@...>]

It depends on whether you want to use the encoding specified by the 
current locale, or always use UTF-8.  The former is a more general 
solution and is probably preferred on Unix; GNU/Linux distributions are 
moving toward UTF-8 anyway.  However, it's problematic on Windows; 
someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that UTF-8 is 
never (or rarely) the encoding associated with the system locale on 
Windows.  So if you always want to use UTF-8, it's probably better to 
use a hand-written converter.

By the way, I find it annoying that on Windows, you have to use special 
wide-character functions if you want your code to be Unicode-aware; 
passing UTF-8 strings around would be a much more portable solution.  I 
have considered developing an alternative C runtime library for Windows 
in which, among other differentiating features, UTF-8 would be assumed 
as the encoding for non-wide-character strings (so for example, you'd 
pass a UTF-8 string to fopen instead of having to call wfopen).  Would 
there be any interest in this among Lua users?

--
Matt Campbell
Lead Programmer
Serotek Corporation
www.freedombox.info
"The Accessibility Anywhere People"