Re: [AD] unicode proposal

[Peter Wang <novalazy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2009-01-20, Elias Pschernig <elias.pschernig@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The topic was brought up a few times already, but at some point we
> should decide what to do about unicode functions in A5.
> 
> An easy solution would be to assume that any strings passed to Allegro
> functions are encoded in UTF8 (that includes all 7-bit ASCII strings).
> Then prefix some of the A4 unicode functions with al_ so users aren't
> completely left in the dark when they have to deal with non-ASCII
> strings.

I basically agree with your function lists.

Later, I think I'd like to introduce explicit iterator types rather than
bare pointers for ugetx (and give it a better name).  Also if sticking
with UTF-8 (or even UTF-16) there's no reason not to introduce backwards
traversal.

The API is prone to buffer overflows and arbitrarily truncated strings
due to the use of preallocated buffers.  Probably the solution is
dynamic allocation.

> _ustrdup (we should add a strdup entry to
> al_set_memory_management_functions and Allegro should use that instead
> of strdup everywhere) 

It should just use the malloc replacement.

> The conversion functions likely can be useful internally in the
> filesystem code - but the user should not have to deal with anything but
> UTF8 when using A5's filesystem layer.

An ISO-8859-1 converter could stay as it's purely a re-encoding.

Peter