Re: Question about line breaks and file types
Re: Question about line breaks and file types
- Subject: Re: Question about line breaks and file types
- From: Douglas Davidson <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 10:28:25 -0700
On Sunday, August 3, 2003, at 10:19 PM, Francisco Tolmasky wrote:
Is there a necessary connection between line breaks and file types.
For example, should a unicode text file use unicode line breaks. I
ask this because programs like BBEdit let you change the line break
style on the fly, seemingly without changing the file type.
There is no necessary connection between the encoding and the line
break types; in particular, just because a file is in UTF-16 or UTF-8
doesn't mean that it should use Unicode line breaks. In fact, the
Unicode breaks are probably among the least likely to be recognized by
code that doesn't recognize all of the types, so you probably shouldn't
use them unless you have some compelling reason for doing so.
Secondly, if I have a textview with UTF 8 characters in it, and
someone pastes something into it, do I have to do anything with it,
like, for example convert it to UTF 8, or is it converted
automatically or what?
The backing store for an NSTextView is an NSTextStorage, which is a
subclass of NSMutableAttributedString. An NSMutableAttributedString
consists of an NSString plus attributes, and NSString is conceptually a
sequence of unichars--the actual storage may vary, but it is concealed
by the NSString interface. You need to worry about encodings only when
you are converting your text into some other form, for example if you
are storing it in a plain text file.
As long as your text is within the text system, Cocoa takes care of it
all for you. This includes handling encodings for all of the standard
pasteboard types that Cocoa recognizes. If you were implementing your
own custom pasteboard type, you might have to concern yourself with
this.
Douglas Davidson
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