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Hi
 
Does anyone know what's coming up in terms of support for Unicode (e.g. UTF-8) in Lua?  This is my current understanding - please correct me if I'm wrong:
 
1. Lua scripts are currently always written in ANSI only, and probably always will be.
 
2. Strings in Lua can be in any format you like (e.g. ANSI, UTF-8 or UTF-16) so apps that want to support Unicode can do so by specifying that string parameters and return values are in a Unicode encoding such as UTF-8.
 
3. There is currently plenty of library support for ANSI Lua strings, but no library support for working with UTF-16 Lua strings.  There are one or two small libaries for doing some simple string manipulation with UTF-8 strings (e.g. http://lua-users.org/wiki/ValidateUnicodeString and http://files.luaforge.net/releases/sln/slnunicode).  UTF-8 is likely to have more support in the future in Lua libraries than UTF-16.
 
4. IUP currently only supports ANSI Lua strings, but support for UTF-8 Lua strings will be added soon?  Is that right?  Any timescales on that?
 
Is the above correct?  Anything important I haven't mentioned?
 
I'm a great fan of Lua.  Support for Unicode is really important for me though.  The above strategy, if correct, is probably OK for my purposes. Ideally I'd prefer script-writers to be able to write scripts in UTF-16 and work entirely in UTF-16 - but I can live without that.  But it will only really work when support for UTF-8 becomes available in IUP - and, ideally, other Lua libraries.  So does anyone know what work, if any, is currently being done on adding support for UTF-8 (or UTF-16?) Lua strings in Lua libraries - such as IUP?
 
TIA
 
Simon