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Re: Implementing NSString getBytes


From: Luboš Doležel
Subject: Re: Implementing NSString getBytes
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:57:01 +0200
User-agent: Roundcube Webmail/0.5

On Mon, 10 Jun 2013 07:58:29 +0100, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
1) it fails if the output buffer is too small - we don't want that in this case

Well, that depends on what arguments you pass to it ... if you
provide it with a zone in which to allocate memory, it will allocate
memory to make a bigger output buffer if necesary.

Not quite. The caller of getBytes supplies his own buffer.
Should the buffer not be sufficient and GSFromUnicode() allocates own memory, I'd then have trouble finding out how many bytes to copy to caller's buffer *without* splitting an UTF-8 character in the middle (for example).

The way I understand it, -getBytes should convert as many *complete* characters as possible.


2) it doesn't tell you how many input characters were converted (which is understandable because of 1)

So I decided to use iconv() directly, which has a pitfall. I'd need to access static members (EntrySupported) of Unicode.m to know the iconv encoding's name etc. So I guess the iconv-related code (as attached) should be moved into Unicode.m.

The problem with using iconv is that on most (all?) platforms, it
doesn't support all the character sets.  That's mostly why the
GSFromUnicode() function exists ... to handle the cases that iconv
can't handle directly.

I see. I thought iconv supports all thinkable character sets - at least on Linux.

It seems to me it would be quite simple to modify GSFromUnicode() to
do what you want ...  you'd need to change the source length argument
to be a pointer, so you could pass back the number of bytes actually
converted (which would mean a trivial change everywhere the function
is called of course).

I will (as has been suggested) add a second GS*() function that has this pointer and doesn't fail if the output buffer becomes full. Then I'll rewrite GSFromUnicode() to call this function and fail if output buffer is full and cannot be grown.

--
Luboš Doležel




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