Hi there,
"stumbling" over a surprising two characters for the single German
character "ß" on the MacOSX, I researched what the situation is on
Ubuntu Linux.
It turns out that the console of all these systems returns non-English
characters as UTF-8 characters.
As a consequence e.g. the German single character "sharp s" ("ß") as an
UTF-8 character consists of 16-bits with a hexadecimal value of "C39F"x
(cf. <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/df/index.htm>).
Running the following Rexx program on Windows (codepage 1250) in a shell:
parse version v
say v
a='ß'
say a "length:" a~length
say a "a~c2x: " a~c2x
yields:
REXX-ooRexx_4.1.0(MT) 6.03 23 Aug 2010
ß length: *1*
ß a~c2x: *DF*
Running the same ooRexx program under Ubuntu (and MacOSX) yields:
REXX-ooRexx_4.1.0(MT) 6.03 23 Aug 2010
ß length: *2
*ß a~c2x: *C39F
*
Note that the single character "ß" has suddenly a length of "2" instead
of "1" as under Windows (and has been the case for the past 30 years).
This is a totally different result yielding all of a sudden an
inconsistent behaviour of Rexx programs on different platforms, which
will break quite a few Rexx programs in countries, that have been in a
need to use non-English characters in the past 30 years (practically
everyone living in a country where English is either not the main
language or the only language, i.e. everyone outside of the US, GB,
Australia)! So non-English Rexx programs running on ooRexx on those
systems will mostlikely break, possibly in a very subtle manner.
Although this problem has been known for some time, it is now realizing
on non-Windows-platforms and needs to be addressed ASAP, IMHO!
---rony
P.S.: Out of curiosity I wrote the following NetRexx program which gets
translated to Java (Java uses UTF-16, where "ß" is represented by
16-bits with a value of "00df"x) by the NetRexx compiler, and gets run
under Windows with the codepage set to 1250:
parse version v
say v
a="ß"
say a "length:" a.length
say a "a.c2x: " a.c2x
output:
E:\java\scriptJars>java test
NetRexx 2.05 14 Jan 2005
ß length: *1*
ß a.c2x: DF
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