Re: [Xmonad] XSelection.hs - Unicode problems

On Sun, Sep 02, 2007 at 01:00:53AM +0200, Mats Jansborg wrote:

Andrea Rossato writes:

...

I hope Mats Jansborg is still reading the mailing list: hopefully he could give us some direction.

I am, sorry for the late reply. Although I'm not sure I'm comfortable being appointed some kind of x11 unicode authority; I'm completely new to low-level X11 programming and what knowledge I have can be had more quickly and reliably by reading the X11 manual, the ICCCM and Keith Packard's paper at http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/selection.ps.

You may not be an authority but you gave me a great help, with many useful references. Thanks you!

The other problem is that you ask for the selection in the STRING encoding. This limits its usefulness immensely, as STRING is unlikely to support many of the characters in the user's locale. X11 and ICCCM defines a method of negotiating the format of the selection. Both UTF8_STRING (which is not in ICCCM but supported by most modern applications) and COMPOUND_TEXT should imho be preferred to STRING which can be used as fallback encoding if neither of the two first two are available. I've previously posted an example of how to read compound text properties in my patch to the NamedWindow module, although that method is not portable either since it uses withCWString from Foreign.C.String which works correctly only if __STDC_ISO_10646__ is defined (i.e. if wchar_t is UTF-

I don't get all the issues involved in converting the selection yet. As a quick try I started using COMPUND_TEXT, which seems to be working well with the ISO-8859-1 character set (Poincar� now works!). For the rest, I think I'll have something to study in the next days...;-) Thank you. Andrea ps: Gwern, you can update hxsel.