Re: [Openexr-devel] UNICODE support in openexr file I/O

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, Florian Kainz wrote:

> OpenEXR uses strings in three places:
>
> - File names
> - Attribute names, for example, "displayWindow" or "pixelAspectRatio".
> - Attribute values, for example the channel names in the channels attribute.
>
> String processing operations performed by the IlmImf library include:
>
> - copying
> - comparing and sorting, in order to find attributes or channels by name
> - concatenation, usually to generate error messages such as
>  "Cannot open file foo.exr (Permission denied)."
>
> As far as I know, all of those operations work the same way for regular char 
> strings and for UTF-8-encoded Unicode.  (Character counting or sub-string 
> extraction would have to know about UTF-8, but we don't do that in IlmImf.)

This is all good, but there is one sticky issue.  If UTF-8 is now 
stored in OpenEXR files, then OpenEXR may return a UTF-8 string to an 
application which is not designed for UTF-8 (e.g. traditional "Unix" 
application) and the application may misbehave.  Is this a possible 
scenario?  If this is a possible scenario, then perhaps new interfaces 
should be added to support UTF-8, and the legacy interfaces should 
behave as closely as possible to before (by transforming to the native 
character set if possible).

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/