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Postings from December 2000
Here's a little something that someone might consider doing over
the holiday season, a nice way to get to know UTF-8 if someone
feels the urge or interest to do so.
There are (*still*, after much cleaning) various spots all over the
code that do UTF-8 parsing 'from scratch' without using the utilities
provided by utf8.c. There are for example three spots that output
"Malformed UTF-8 character" which are not the utf8.c:utf8_to_uv().
Another good way to find such places is to grep for '0x[8c]0'.
If someone would clean up all such naughty spots using either the
functions (utf8_to_uv(), uv_to_utf8(), utf8_length(), utf8_distance(),
utf8_hop(), etc.) of utf8.c, or the macros (UTF8_XXX, UNIYYY) of
utf8.h, I would be very grateful.
(For a quick brush-up on the UTF-8 encoding and other character code
issues, surf over to http://www.czyborra.com/) (It's for a function,
say, pp_foo(), to do foo on UTF-8 strings, there is no need to migrate
that specific code to utf8.c, it's just the repeated (and therefore
error-prone) UTF-8 code that worries me.)
(One detail comes to my mind: I would like to see a safer utf8_hop():
a 'start' pointer, and a 'length', so that the pointer couldn't wander
off the buffer boundaries.)
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
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