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UTF-8 Support for Jim Tcl
=========================
Author: Steve Bennett <steveb@workware.net.au>
Date: 2 Nov 2010 10:55:52 EST
OVERVIEW
--------
Early versions of Jim Tcl supported strings, including binary strings containing
nulls, however it had no support for multi-byte character encodings.
In some fields, such as when dealing with the web, or other user-generated content,
support for multi-byte character encodings is necessary.
In these cases it would be very useful for Jim Tcl to be able to process strings
as multi-byte character strings rather than simply binary bytes.
Supporting multiple character encodings and translation between those encodings
is beyond the scope of Jim Tcl. Therefore, Jim has been enhanced to add support
for UTF-8, as the most popular general purpose multi-byte encoding.
UTF-8 support is optional. It can be enabled at compile time with:
./configure --enable-utf8
The Jim Tcl documentation fully documents the UTF-8 support. This README includes
additional background information.
Unicode vs UTF-8
----------------
It is important to understand that Unicode is an abstract representation
of the concept of a "character", while UTF-8 is an encoding of
Unicode into bytes. Thus the Unicode codepoint U+00B5 is encoded
in UTF-8 with the byte sequence: 0xc2, 0xb5. This is different from
ASCII where the same name is used interchangeably between a character value
and its encoding.
Unicode Escapes
---------------
Even without UTF-8 enabled, it is useful to be able to encode UTF-8 characters
in strings. This can be done with the \uNNNN Unicode escape. This syntax
is compatible with Tcl and is enabled even if UTF-8 is disabled.
Unlike Tcl, Jim Tcl supports Unicode characters up to 21 bits.
In addition to \uNNNN, Jim Tcl also supports variable length Unicode
character specifications with \u{NNNNNN} where there may be anywhere between
1 and 6 hex within the braces. e.g. \u{24B62}
UTF-8 Properties
----------------
Due to the design of the UTF-8 encoding, many (most) commands continue
to work with UTF-8 strings. This is due to the following properties of UTF-8:
* ASCII characters in strings have the same representation in UTF-8
* An ASCII string will never match the middle of a multi-byte UTF-8 sequence
* UTF-8 strings can be sorted as bytes and produce the same result as sorting
by characters
* UTF-8 strings in Jim continue to be null terminated
Commands Supporting UTF-8
-------------------------
The following commands have been enhanced to support UTF-8 strings.
* array {get,names,unset}
* case
* glob
* lsearch -glob, -regexp
* switch -glob, -regexp
* regexp, regsub
* format
* scan
* split
* string index, range, length, compare, equal, first, last, map, match, reverse, tolower, toupper
* string bytelength (new)
* info procs, commands, vars, globals, locals
Character Classes
-----------------
Jim Tcl has no support for UTF-8 character classes. Thus [:alpha:]
will match [a-zA-Z], but not non-ASCII alphabetic characters. The
same is true for 'string is'.
Regular Expressions
-------------------
Normally, Jim Tcl uses the system-supplied POSIX-compatible regex
implementation.
Typically systems do not provide a UTF-8 capable regex implementation,
therefore when UTF-8 support is enabled, the built-in regex
implementation is used which includes UTF-8 support.
Case Insensitivity
------------------
Case folding is much more complex under Unicode than under ASCII.
For example it is possible for a character to change the number of
bytes required for representation when converting from one case to
another. Jim Tcl supports only "simple" case folding, where case
is folded only where the number of bytes does not change.
Case folding tables are automatically generated from the official
unicode data table at http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt
Working with Binary Data and non-UTF-8 encodings
------------------------------------------------
Almost all Jim commands will work identically with binary data and
UTF-8 encoded data, including read, gets, puts and 'string eq'. It
is only certain string manipulation commands that behave differently.
For example, 'string index' will return UTF-8 characters, not bytes.
If it is necessary to manipulate strings containing binary, non-ASCII
data (bytes >= 0x80), there are two options.
1. Build Jim without UTF-8 support
2. Use 'string byterange', 'string bytelength' and 'pack', 'unpack' and
'binary' to operate on strings as bytes rather than characters.
Internal Details
----------------
Jim_Utf8Length() will calculate the character length of the string and cache
it for later access. It uses utf8_strlen() which relies on the string to be null
terminated (which it always will be).
It is possible to tell if a string is ascii-only because length == bytelength
It is possible to provide optimised versions of various routines for
the ascii-only case. Both 'string index' and 'string range' currently
perform such optimisation.
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