Hi,
In our C source, we have been trained to use scm_from_locale_string et
al. This is usually the right thing to do when interacting with the
operating system.
However, when we have literals in C source code, I think this strategy
is incorrect. I write my C source code in UTF-8 or in ISO-8859-1, but if
the user is running in another locale, they will not load my
strings/symbols/keywords correctly.
The solution is to use functions that specify the locale. We don't have
those yet, but we do have the capability to write them
now. Specifically:
scm_from_utf8_string
scm_from_utf8_symbol
scm_from_utf8_keyword
scm_from_latin1_string
scm_from_latin1_symbol
scm_from_latin1_keyword
We probably also need the "n" variants.
It's unlikely that you have a known utf-32 string as a char*, but we
should probably also provide scm_t_uint16* and scm_t_uint32* variants
for utf16 and utf32.
* * *
We also have the converse problem: since the easiest (and recommended)
way to get a char* from a Scheme string has been scm_to_locale_string,
in many cases we give external libraries locale-encoded strings instead
of the encoding they expect.
For example, most GLib-based libraries expect utf-8 strings, but
Guile-GNOME ignorantly passes them the result of calling
scm_to_locale_string. Though this will work in UTF-8 locales, it's only
by accident.
So then we need, I think:
scm_to_utf8_string
scm_to_utf16_string
scm_to_utf32_string
We need the "n" variants here too (perhaps more).
What do people think? Any takers on implementing this? :)
Cheers,
Andy
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