Migration to Unicode
Revision as of 15:07, 8 November 2012 by Manus (Talk | contribs) (Updated rules for Unicode migration to the latest EiffelBase design)
This is a summary of the recommendations for adapting applications to handle Unicode.
General rule
- Never use
STRING_8
or any variant of it unless you write a program that is going to be deleted in 5 minutes after running it. Do not even consider usingSTRING_8
or its variant. Always useIMMUTABLE_STRING_32
,READABLE_STRING_32
orSTRING_32
. - Do not use classes from third-party libraries that take
STRING_8
rather thanSTRING_32
. - Use
PATH
to manipulate file or directory names - Whenever an API takes a READABLE_STRING_GENERAL argument, assumes that STRING_8 will be treated as Unicode strings in the range 0 .. 255, unless explicitly noted.
Temporary solution
- Replace types using the following table:
Old class | New class |
---|---|
STRING_8
|
STRING_32
|
FILE_NAME
|
PATH
|
DIRECTORY_NAME
|
PATH
|
KL_BINARY_INPUT_FILE
|
KL_BINARY_INPUT_FILE_32
|
KL_TEXT_OUTPUT_FILE
|
KL_TEXT_OUTPUT_FILE_32
|
EXECUTION_ENVIRONMENT
|
EXECUTION_ENVIRONMENT_32
|
- Consider using
READABLE_STRING_32
for argument types. If you cannot immediately change argument types to takeREADABLE_STRING_32
, e.g. because this is a library class, useREADABLE_STRING_GENERAL
and perform all the necessary conversions inside the routine. - If you need to convert one UTF encoding into another one, use
UTF_CONVERTER
. This is an expanded class, so it's possible to declare a local variable of this type and call features on it without explicit object creation. - Consider using
SHARED_EXECUTION_ENVIRONMENT
to accessEXECUTION_ENVIRONMENT_32
.