Re: unicode support in lua

[David Jones <drj@...>]

On 26 Apr 2007, at 13:35, David Kastrup wrote:

> It may also be considered somewhat counterintuitive that the call
>
> unicode.utf8.byte(unicode.utf8.char(5000))
>
> returns 5000, something which naive people like myself would not
> exactly choose to call a "byte".

string.char and string.byte are inverses, and it seems sensible to  
extend this inverse into the unicode.utf8 domain.

When I implemented Lua in Java, strings were implemented using  
java.lang.String (so using Java's 16-bit unsigned char type).  I took  
a similar position, string.byte returned an integer between 0 and 65535.

string.byte should probably be named string.code to avoid any  
emotional attachment to byte.

Whilst almost all bytes are 8-bit (octets), byte does have other  
meanings apart from 8-bit number.  Google for "14-bit byte", etc.

David Jones