[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#1824) Re: Re: (PR#2743) Blank messages and bad packet strings

["Raimar Falke via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 02:05:59PM -0800, Jason Short via RT wrote:
> > I ask another time: Is unicode the best solution? Why don't we use it?
> 
> Unicode isn't "the solution".  "The solution" is converting from the 
> charset the strings are in into the local charset.
> 
> Putting the charsets into unicode may be part of the solution.  But 
> without the other part, this will keep the same problem but reverse who 
> sees it (i.e., everyone who currently sees accented characters will see 
> garbage, and most people who currently see garbage will see accented 
> characters).
> 
> The system is further complicated because client and server may have 
> different charsets.  Here the solution may be to put all 
> charset-dependent strings into unicode.

This is a bit too general. We have the rulesets and what the player
types (city names & chat messages) as input. In an ideal world the
input, the network protocol, the output and all the other rest would
be in unicode. We control the rulesets, the network protocol and the
rest but not the player input and the GUI output.

So one solution would be to use unicode where we can use it and for
the parts we don't control need to use converters to and from
unicode. This is a very clean solution and if the GUI also supports
unicode (like GTK2 does) we have no converters at all. This is IMHO a
realistic solution. Only problems I see is that we need to change some
char into wchar (or whatever), use some other functions and there may
be problems with unicode editors for the rulesets. I would think that
emacs supports unicode but I have never tested or used it.

        Raimar

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