Re: converting octal escape sequences to utf-8 and back

[Roland Winkler]

On Sun May 29 2011 Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> This should do what you want:
> 
>   (with-output-to-string (princ (encode-coding-string STRING 'utf-8)))
> 
> (the STRING argument should be the entire string that you want to send
> to that program of yours).

Thank you. This seems to do what I want.

> But this is crazy, IMO: Lisp code should not need to jump through the
> hoops like that to produce such an octal representation.  TRT is to
> have a special encoding for this

For what I want to do, this seems to be not a bottleneck. (I am
playing with a frontend for the program djvused.) -- I do not know
how common are rare my problem is to justify a new encoding for it.
Certainly, a new encoding goes much beyond my knowledge of these
things.

The web page http://billposer.org/Software/ListOfRepresentations.html
lists about 30 unicode escape formats which emacs possibly could
implement. I do not know how many of these formats are possibly
already implemented. For most of them this web page includes example
programs using it; and some of these programs appear to be more
common. For the particular format I need, this web page simply says
"used by various programs". So I don't know how common my particular
problem might be to justify such an effort. Maybe some other formats
described there would be yet more helpful for other people.

Roland