Re: Unicode and XSL (was substring())

Subject: Re: Unicode and XSL (was substring())
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 00:03:16 +0100 (BST)
combining characters are not necessarily the main problem.
I'd argue that they ought to count as separate characters as that is
what they are in the character data of the XMl spec.

Harder are characters out of the basic plane of unicode. These are a
single character in XML eg accessed by a single &#1234; but since
they don't fit into 16bits, they take up two slots when the unicode
is encoded in utf-16. So the natural thing to do is to count these
characters as single characters, but that means string indexing requires
walking the string and thus proportional to the index rather than being
a constant time array lookup. It also means that indexing and string
length give different values if you use a `pure XML' approach or if
you escape out to some language that treats strings as an array of 16bit
quantities. 

IT WAS SO MUCH SIMPLER IN THE OLD DAYS OF 6 BIT TEXT....

David


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