Re: unibyte<->multibyte conversion [Re: Emacs-diffs Digest, Vol 2, Issue 28]

[Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org>]

In article <200301202055.h0KKtun11691@rum.cs.yale.edu>, "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:
> While we're at it, how about making string-as-multibyte obsolete ?
> It's not used much and it has been abused many times in the past.

It is useful for instance in this scenario.  I don't
remember a concrete example, but some package is doing this
kind of thing.

Read a file of weird encoding in a unibyte buffer.  Parse
the contents and do decode-coding-region one bunch by one
with different coding systems.  Extract some part from that
unibyte buffer and insert it in a mulitbyte buffer.   The
last step is:
   (let ((str (buffer-substring FROM TO)))
     (save-excursion
       (set-buffer MULTIBYTE-BUF)
       (insert (string-as-multibyte str))))

> Also, I believe it's more or less equivalent to

>   (decode-coding-string str 'emacs-mule)

Yes, for the moment.   But, in emacs-unicode, we must change
it to:
	(decode-coding-string str 'utf-8-emacs)
On the other hand, we don't have to change a code using
string-as-multibyte.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@m17n.org