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* Unibyte characters
@ 2008-10-31 11:05 Eli Zaretskii
  2008-10-31 11:18 ` Miles Bader
  2008-10-31 19:30 ` Richard M. Stallman
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 10+ messages in thread
From: Eli Zaretskii @ 2008-10-31 11:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Kenichi Handa; +Cc: emacs-devel

The ELisp manual has (in node "Text Representation") this explanation
of what is a "unibyte character":

       In unibyte representation, each character occupies one byte and
    therefore the possible character codes range from 0 to 255.  Codes 0
    through 127 are ASCII characters; the codes from 128 through 255 are
    used for one non-ASCII character set [...]

But I think this is inaccurate and even misleading.  For starters,
unibyte buffers and strings can contain DBCS characters and UTF-8
encoded text, where a character certainly does not ``occupy one
byte''.

More generally, I think it is better to say that unibyte buffers and
strings hold raw 8-bit bytes, and that for 8859-x and single-byte
Windows codepages, each such byte represents a single character.

Am I missing something?




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 10+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2008-11-02  1:59 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2008-10-31 11:05 Unibyte characters Eli Zaretskii
2008-10-31 11:18 ` Miles Bader
2008-10-31 11:27   ` Eli Zaretskii
2008-10-31 14:41     ` Stefan Monnier
2008-10-31 15:02       ` Juanma Barranquero
2008-10-31 18:44       ` Eli Zaretskii
2008-10-31 21:15         ` Stefan Monnier
2008-11-01 10:47           ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2008-11-02  1:59             ` Stefan Monnier
2008-10-31 19:30 ` Richard M. Stallman

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