Re: [Pnet-developers] String marshalling

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Friday 09 September 2005 07:29 pm, Marc Haisenko wrote:
> Hi folks,
> well it seems that bug #14368 (X lib doesn't display Unicode characters
> like ∞ (u221e)) is not fixed at all. I'm currently mailing back and forth
> with Peter Flaig.
>
> While investigating the string marshalling I noticed a few things:
>
> What's an ANSI charset ? That should be ASCII, shouldn't it ? I'd like to
> change that.

Windows has traditionally used "ANSI" to mean the locale-specific 8-bit 
character set in use by the OS, even those character sets that aren't 
strictly in the ANSI standard (e.g. Shift-JIS for Japanese).  In Unix terms, 
it is the multibyte encoding that is processed by mbtowc and friends.

> Is there any reason at all to not use UTF-8 for all .NET -> C string
> marshalling ? Why the ANSI (ASCII ?) option ?

Because it is the easiest thing to draw using the XFontSet routines in Xlib, 
which use the locale-specific encoding.  By using ANSI for the marshalling, 
the runtime engine takes care of the conversion, rather than having 
XsharpSupport do it.

Cheers,

Rhys.