MultiByte Encoding Support

[hnakamur]

Something like Unix pipe would be best, for example, shift_jis -> UTF-8 -> to_lower.

Avoid iconv because of license incompatibility.
Maybe we can use some parts of libnkf, bsdconv, PHP's mbstring.

This is a very important subject, so let's take time for consideration.

[dvv]

couldn't you explain the subj a bit more verbose? tia

[kristate]

@dvv I just changed the title to MultiByte Encoding Support

[hnakamur]

Strings in Lua may contain any 8-bit value, including embedded zeros, which can be specified as ‘\0’,
according to http://www.lua.org/ftp/refman-5.0.pdf

So we can use any multibyte character encoding such as Shift_JIS or EUC-JIS as well as UTF-8.
Therefore we need APIs for converting encodings in strings or cBuffers.
We'd like those APIs to be

• able to work on partial inputs (which might end in the middle of a multibyte character) and successive calls of the conversion API for more input on the next read will continue conversion. Here I suppose reading input bytes in a fixed sized cBuffer, say 4KB for example.
• able to concatenate multiple conversions, for example Shift_JIS -> UTF-8 and UTF-8 -> to_lower. like Unix pipes,

We would like to define APIs to satisfy these goals. So more than a just simple API like convert(src, dest_encoding) returns dest is needed.

@dvv I hope this explanation is clear enough.

[hnakamur]

We should decide rules for encodings for strings and cBuffers.

It's just an idea, my take is to use only UTF-8 for strings and any encoding for cBuffers.
And we would add APIs to cBuffers for interoperability to strings, so that we can pass cBuffers to APIs which expects strings.

However, I have not thought about it thoroughly yet, so i'm not sure this actually works. Maybe any encoding for both strings and cBuffers is a better way.

[dvv]

right. as previously stated, imho it's better to keep small and clean as far as we can, so utf-8 should be enough for starters.
i have something related to this domain -- unicode -- do not know whether useful.