On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> wrote: > One notable example is when the original encoding was determined > incorrectly, and the application wants to "re-decode" the string, when > its external origin is no longer available.
Okay, but then I would suggest either if you know you're probably not getting the right encoding but can determine it later to only store the input as a bytevector and later decode it correctly. Or if you already have the string you could encode it back to a bytevector with the wrong guessed encoding (which should emit the original input I think) and then re-decode it with the right encoding. Wouldn't that be the same solution as adding a primitive which does the same thing but on some lower level? > Another example is an > application that wants to convert an encoded string into base-64 (or > similar) form -- you'll need to encode the string internally first. Here I don't have enough experience, but wouldn't you then just again transform the string into a bytevector and further work with it? > IOW, Guile needs a way to represent a string encoded in something > other than UTF-8, and convert between UTF-8 and other encodings. I think strings should be encoding `independent', so you don't have to mind that if you don't need to, and if you're working with a special encoding you're working on a representation of the `text' as a number of characters encoded in some numbers, so you use a bytevector. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether guile supports encoding a string (into a bytevector) in some other format than UTF-8, so if there don't exist other procedures I would suggest adding a string to bytevector decoder which takes an encoder and the encoders (or just procedures which convert the string directly into a bytevector in a specific encoding). WDYT?
