Hello, Although there are existing third-party libraries for character encoding conversions (including one personal implementation), since ECL has everything needed for UTF-8 encoding/decoding I think that it'd be nice if it could out-of-the-box permit conversion between bytes and strings with the wanted external-format.
If there exists such a facility natively other than reading/writing files, I'd be happy to know. What I tried initially was creating a string stream and trying to change its external-format, but that is not permitted. A simple example situation is when decoding URL % HEX HEX escaped sequences. If the string containing such a URL to be decoded is already exists, it needs to be treated as bytes more than characters for such escaping to happen, and the escaped bytes might represent UTF-8 characters, which need to be "re-read" into an unicode string. If there was a facility such as make-bytes-output-stream/with-output-to-bytes and make-bytes-input-stream/with-input-from-bytes, for instance, with customizable external-format, this would be very easy to do. Of course, reading from a bytes array would then also be expected to signal the same errors as when reading from a file. Or, alternatively, something like (SBCL and Babel, if I remember?) provide, ext:octets-to-string and ext:string-to-octets with an :encoding key, yet I'm not sure what the proper interface would be to deal with decoding errors here, if we wanted to permit resuming. I guess that the error condition could contain the offset where the error was found and/or have a restart like read... Suggestions? (other than using third party or custom facilities, of course). Once we established what interface we want, I could probably help for the implementation if necessary. Thanks, -- Matt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Ecls-list mailing list Ecls-list@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ecls-list
