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Re: Unibyte characters


From: Richard M. Stallman
Subject: Re: Unibyte characters
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:30:57 -0400

           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''.

As far as Emacs is concerned, that UTF-8 sequence is multiple
characters and each of those characters is one byte.  The fact that
one might interpret that byte sequence some other way in another
context is not a part of the Emacs text representation.

So the text is correct.  But it could be useful to add something
to explain how this unibyte text relates to other interpretations
of the same byte sequence.




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