[xmonad] spawn functions are not unicode safe

[Gwern Branwen]

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On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Eric Mertens  wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 12:04 -0500, Gwern Branwen wrote:
>
>> Perhaps we're over-thinking all this. Is it a problem in any way to
>> run encodeString over a String that is just normal ASCII (that is, no
>> funky Unicode)?
>>
>> Eric: could we just mindlessly call encodeString on everything going
>> into spawn/safeSpawn?
>
> ASCII is valid UTF-8 encoded Unicode, however Latin1 is not. So as long
> as you stick to ASCII (values less than 128) you can treat them as
> UTF-8.
>
> ISO 8859-1 and ASCII Extended are not valid UTF-8, however (due to their
> use of the values 128-255)
>
> Does this answer your question?

If I'm understanding you, the answer is 'you can safely call
encodeString on ASCII text, and UTF text, but you cannot on ISO8859-1
& ASCII Extended'. So we can either default to calling encodeString,
checking whether it's ISO/Extended (and not calling encodeString if
True); or we can default to not calling encodeString, and enabling it
if a check for UTF returns true.

I guess since Alexey has already provided a check for UTF, then we
should probably use the latter strategy.

- --
gwern
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