Hi Andy, Andy Wingo <wi...@pobox.com> writes: > Quiz: what does this do? > > (define (f s) > (with-output-to-string (lambda () (display s)))) > > When called with a string, what should it do? Like (f "foo"). > > If you answered, "return the string", that's what I would think it > should do. > > But no, currently the answer is locale-specific. It encodes the string > according to the current locale, then decodes it from that encoding. If > your locale can't encode the string, tough luck for you! > > This is a bit crazy. Surely the port should be textual? Surely the > default encoding for a string port should be utf-8 or something that can > actually handle all strings?
I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, the current broken behavior of string ports has been recommended in our official forums as a clever way to do arbitrary iconv conversions. Nonetheless, I still think it ought to be fixed properly in 2.2. Here are some past discussions on this topic: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=11197 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.guile.devel/14533 Mark
