Re: When a string is not a string for Palm Desktop
Re: When a string is not a string for Palm Desktop
- Subject: Re: When a string is not a string for Palm Desktop
- From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 15:21:05 -0700
On Friday, May 2, 2003, at 04:07 AM, Richard Morton wrote:
Must be 'international text' then I guess. ;) Somewhere along the
line the string - a full path - was made up using some Unicode
perhaps. I coerce it to string in the script & under OS 8/9 it was
always plain text, but under X it's styled.
Yes, because paths under Mac OS X are technically all Unicode. When
you coerce Unicode text to a string, it applies style information in
order to preserve the encoding information as best it can. Remember,
by throwing away the style information, you are losing information and
possibly corrupting the string.
Insofar as I was complaining, it was more that I couldn't remove the
style from the string without a hack & the fact that AS is opaque
about the class - if it's international text, then it would be handy
if AS would tell me so.
Internally, there's no such thing as "international text"; that's
merely a transport format. Once it makes it into AppleScript, it's no
longer international text, it's merely a string which may have style
information.
PD 4.1 baulks at setting one of its text fields to this, though
older versions dealt with it OK. The script returns the error
"Can't make <<script>> into a string"
Unfortunately, it looks like you found a bug here. When you set the
title of a memo Palm Desktop tries to coerce the value to a Pascal
string ('pstr'), which fails. Coercing to text ('TEXT') seems to
work, though.
Note to implementors: Use of any implicitly encoded text type (i.e.,
typeText, typePString, and typeCString) is strongly discouraged in Mac
OS X, because they're incapable of representing international data.
Use of typePString and typeCString is especially discouraged, because
they don't support the full range of text coercions. This would
reasonably be considered a bug, but probably not one very high on our
list, since we want those types to die anyway.
--Chris Nebel
Apple Development Tools
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