Re: Bad Characters from Unicode
Re: Bad Characters from Unicode
- Subject: Re: Bad Characters from Unicode
- From: Luther Fuller <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 13:32:35 -0500
On Oct 2, 2007, at 12:30 PM, has wrote:
1. If you don't already have some understanding of character sets,
encodings, the distinction between 'bytes' and 'characters', etc.
then I recommend brushing up your knowledge first as you won't get
far otherwise. Here's a good place to start:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
I've been looking for good articles for the last couple of days. I
sat before my computer to search more when this message pops up.
Downloaded and will be read soon. Thanks.
2. AppleScript's Unicode support is 1. crap, and 2. partly broken.
In particular, its list-to-Unicode-text coercion is buggy and may
produce truncated text. If you must do text processing in
AppleScript, use TextCommands or a Unicode-aware scriptable text
editor (e.g. Text Wrangler, Smile) to do the actual work. e.g.
TextCommands has commands for splitting and joining text, changing
case and finding and replacing.
Just moments ago, I searched AppleScript documentation for "UTF" ...
nothing. And I can find nothing, absolutely nothing, about exactly
how Unicode is coerced to (extended ascii) text, although I did find
mention that it is done.
3. If you need to convert text between different encodings, use the
appropriate tools - e.g. the command-line textutil utility,
TextCommands' 'convert from unicode', 'convert to unicode' and
'stringify' commands, etc.
BTW, if you do a lot of text processing or regularly deal with non-
ASCII encodings, then unless you're a sadomasochist I'd recommend
finding yourself a better language than AppleScript. e.g. Python's
Unicode
My text processing is mostly confined to file names and comments.
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