Re: Unibyte characters, strings, and buffers

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden
>> Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 20:25:17 +0100
>> 
>> >> > Then what do you call a buffer whose "text" is encoded?
>> >> 
>> >> I can't speak for Stephen, of course, but my impression was he would
>> >> call it "a bad idea".
>> >
>> > Then what other ideas to use when Lisp code needs to encode or decode
>> > text manually?
>> 
>> Redecode right to a "binary" coding system would be my guess.
>
> Sorry, I don't follow.  Can you tell more what that means?

It means a buffer where each _character_ has the same value that the
no-longer-available unibyte buffer would have in its bytes/characters.

> The situation I was describing is that I need to do something with
> undecoded bytes before decoding them, or after encoding them.

You can do that whether or not the conceptual array of 0..255 characters
is internally encoded in unibyte or multibyte encodings.

-- 
David Kastrup