Hi Roger, Thank you for the feedback! It's always good to hear from developers actually using or planning to use the API we're putting together.
I saw Addison's and your follow-up, but will reply to this message because it has the meat of your feedback. Note that my proposal has been approved by TC 39 for ES6, but Allen sometimes has to tweak details to match the rest of the spec, and not all parts of the proposal are incorporated into the spec yet. More inline below. Regards, Norbert On Nov 14, 2012, at 6:06 , Roger Andrews wrote: > This is rather long but the idea is to make handling UTF16 surrogates > easier for the casual user without harming the ability of UTF16 experts to > delve into details if surrogates are not well-paired (and hence the string > is not well-formed). > > Under the current definitions (ed. 6_10-26-12) surprising things happen. > E.g. a string converted to an array of codepoints with 'codePointAt' then > back to a string with 'fromCodePoint' is not equal to the original string > if it contains well-formed surrogate pairs. Can you give an example usage scenario where this round-trip conversion is necessary? Note that my proposal contains an iterator [1] as a more convenient interface for developers who need to access the code points of a string in sequence (this hasn't made it into the spec yet). The current version returns substrings; an alternative version could return integers - feedback on that would be helpful. [1] http://norbertlindenberg.com/2012/05/ecmascript-supplementary-characters/index.html#String > Here are some thoughts from a JavaScript enthusiast playing with Unicode > outside the BMP. > > > String.prototype.codePointAt > ---------------------------- > > The current definition of codePointAt has results: > out-of-bounds -> Undefined > normal BMP char -> the codepoint > lead surrogate of a good pair -> the codepoint > trail surrogate of a good pair -> codeunit in [0xDC00:0xDFFF] !!ambiguous > bad trail surrogate -> codeunit in [0xDC00:0xDFFF] > bad lead surrogate -> codeunit in [0xD800:0xDBFF] > > Note that a well-paired trail surrogate still results in a value even though > the previous codeunit "subsumed" it. So, if a caller is indexing down the > string then it should take the well-paired trail surrogate value out of the > sequence. > > UTF16 experts can write code to check these possibilities; but for general > usability lets have: > Undefined for the trail surrogate of a good pair, and > NaN for bad surrogate. The current spec requires developers to check whether a returned code point is above 0xFFFF and skip one string element if that's the case (see the implementation of the proposed iterator). Your proposed spec requires them to check whether a code point is *undefined* and skip it if that's the case. Is that really better? NaN seems a bad choice because it's not a code point and so forces callers to check for it separately. For cases where the actual bad surrogate is not wanted, U+FFFD is the standard choice. > Then codePointAt would do the work for the casual user and experts can probe > the string with charCodeAt (or codeUnitAt if it exists) if they really want > to know the situation of bad surrogates. > > [Unchanged, users are called upon to write code patterns like the messy.... > > // if the indexed position is part of a well-formed surrogate pair > // then result is either the entire code-point (for lead surrogates) > // or undefined (for trail surrogates) > // result is NaN for bad surrogates > // (result is always undefined for out-of-bounds position) > > cp = str.codePointAt( pos ); > if (0xDC00 <= cp && cp <= 0xDFFF) { > cu = str.charCodeAt( pos-1 ); > if (0xD800 <= cu && cu <= 0xDBFF) { > cp = undefined; // trail surrogate of good pair > } > } > if (0xD800 <= cp && cp <= 0xDFFF) { > cp = NaN; // bad surrogate > } > > ] That might be necessary if they really want to deal with undefined and NaN. I think it would be more useful to look at actual usage scenarios and see how they can be addressed using the iterator or codePointAt directly. Can you provide some of the algorithms (simplified if necessary) where you're trying to support supplementary characters? > String.prototype.charCodeAt / String.prototype.codeUnitAt > --------------------------- > > The existing charCodeAt returns NaN (not Undefined) if the indexed position > is out-of-bounds, unlike codePointAt. > > For consistency, there could be a method 'codeUnitAt' which behaves like > (and is named like) codePointAt; i.e. returns Undefined for out-of-bounds. There's been an argument that codePointAt should return NaN like codeUnitAt [2, 3; thread 4 for context]. What's your view on this? [2] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-August/024587.html [3] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-August/024606.html [4] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-August/thread.html#24576 > String.prototype.charAt / String.prototype.unicodeCharAt > ----------------------- > > The existing charAt does not handle UTF16 surrogate pairs. > > For consistency with the above, there could be a method 'unicodeCharAt' > which returns the 1- or 2-char string corresponding to the 'codePointAt' > value and empty-string for out-of-bounds or a well-paired trail surrogate. > Note that an array of such strings could be joined to form the original > string. Again, would be good to look at usage scenarios. codePointAt fits scenarios where you want to look up information about a code point in tables. How would you use the code point strings? I assume joining comes only at the end of an algorithm that modifies the string in some way. > String.fromCodePoint > -------------------- > > The current definition of fromCodePoint does not convert a sequence produced > by codePointAt back to the original string. > > This is really due to codePointAt returning a trail surrogate value after > a well-formed pair (which were just converted to a single codepoint). > > If codePointAt is changed to return Undefined for a good trail surrogate > then fromCodePoint should simply ignore Undefined arguments. Currently I > think it throws RangeError (or maybe converts Undefined values to NUL > chars?). It throws RangeError because ToNumber(undefined) is NaN. > String.fromCharCode / String.fromCodeUnit > ------------------- > > The existing fromCharCode converts undefined,null,NaN,Infinity values into > NUL chars (U+0000), and maps other naughty values into valid chars. > > For consistency, there could be a function 'fromCodeUnit' which behaves like > (and is named like) fromCodePoint; i.e. throws RangeError for naughty > values. This function should also have arity = 0 like fromCodePoint. > > If fromCodePoint is changed to ignore Undefined arguments > then so should fromCodeUnit. > > > String.isWellFormed > ------------------- > > To enable a user easily to detect a well-/ill-formed string how about a > friendly predicate: > String.isWellFormed( str ) More likely, String.prototype.isWellFormedUTF16(). Would you actually use such a method in your code? It seems reasonable, but there's the risk that algorithms actually have stricter requirements, therefore implement their own checks, and don't use this method. > Without this, the following regexp should test a string for well-formedness > (no warranty implied): > /^(?:[\uD800-\uDBFF][\uDC00-\uDFFF]|[\u0000-\uD7FF\uE000-\uFFFF])*$/ > > > String.prototype.repair > ----------------------- > > Following on from isWellFormed, what is the user to do with an ill-formed > string? Here is one suggestion: a 'repair' method which replaces improper > surrogates with something (like the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD). > (Alternatively, the user may want to give up and throw an Error, see next.) > > [Here is a possible implementation which UTF16 experts could shim in.... > > var re_badsurrogate = > /[\uD800-\uDBFF](?![\uDC00-\uDFFF])|([^\uD800-\uDBFF])[\uDC00-\uDFFF]|^[\uDC00-\uDFFF]/g; > > String.prototype.repair = function (replacer) > { > if (arguments.length == 0) replacer = "\uFFFD"; > > return this.replace( re_badsurrogate, "$1"+replacer ); > }; > > ] Again, seems reasonable, but would you actually use it in your code? > StringError (& URI functions) > ----------- > > The existing encodeURI & encodeURIComponent throw URIError if given an > ill-formed string. (The URI decode function similar both for ill-formed > strings and improper use of percent-coding.) > > A new Error, called StringError, could be thrown by URI functions and user > functions which reject an ill-formed string *because* it is ill-formed, > (rather than trying to repair it). > > To avoid changing the existing URI functions, versions using StringError > could be moved from global namespace to a "URI" namespace (ala "JSON"): > URI.encodeComponent, ... > This seems quite neat, and declutters the global namespace too. I don't think TC 39 would introduce new variants of the URI functions just to change the errors they throw. ECMAScript 6 introduces modules [6], which would handle the namespace problem - see in particular the proposal to modularize the standard built-in functionality [7]. [6] http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:modules [7] http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:modules_standard _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
