Re: String combining speed trick no longer works...
Re: String combining speed trick no longer works...
- Subject: Re: String combining speed trick no longer works...
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 20:08:32 -0800
On 12/3/02 7:15 PM, "Matthew Stuckwisch" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
...if you plan on using Unicode text.
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>
I'm sure that we've all known about the {"a","b"} as string method to
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more rapidly join together strings in large numbers. While trying
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desperately to figure out why the caron-G, cedille-S, dotted-capital-I,
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and dotless-lowercase-I wouldn't work in my AS Studio program I found
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that the following will not function properly (at least not with some
>
characters):
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set a to "a" as Unicode text
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set b to "b" as Unicode text
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set c to {a,b} as Unicode text
>
>
As such, if you plan on using or even possibly any type of Unicode
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characters in a script or program, I strongly advise starting out using
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(a & b) instead of {a,b}
This is a very tricky topic. Apparently there are two different ways that
Latin-with-diacritics can be encoded in Unicode: as "pre-composed"
characters, and as "de-composed" basic-Latin-characters plus diacritics
(separately). I may have this backwards, but I believe that the characters
you're reading from Cocoa text fields, etc. are one type (pre-composed?),
and AppleScript does the other type (decomposed). It's a shame that Unicode,
which was supposed to remove all ambiguities, allows two different
"spellings" of these characters. As I understand it, the de-composed method
is better because it allows or every possible combination, even if they
aren't all used now. But the pre-composed method is much more practical for
languages that use them every day, and so they still exist and are used. I
probably have got this exactly right, but it's something along those lines.
Concatenation may preserve pre-composed characters but 'list-as-string'
methods may somehow enforce the standard de-composed characters. Or maybe
it's just a bug
Maybe an Apple person here can comment?
--
Paul Berkowitz
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