Re: Patch for Review: JvGetStringUTFChars

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce at mckinlay dot net dot nz>]

On Thursday, Aug 14, 2003, at 03:11 Pacific/Auckland, Mohan Embar wrote:

> > My only concern is that, in most of the cases where these UTF8
> > conversions are being done in libgcj, we really want to be able to
> > convert into any native character set, not just UTF - especially for
> > windows which afaik does not even use UTF8? So we'll really need
> > another API entirely.
>
> This other API could also open up a can of worms. The MinGW
> port has the issues you mentioned, as indicated here:
>
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java-patches/2003-q2/msg00328.html
>
> ...but I don't think that unconditionally going against libiconv is
> the answer. MinGW doesn't use libiconv, and we probably
> wouldn't need to for WinNT-based MinGW because we could
> invoke the Unicode OS API directly.

What I have in mind is a wrapper around the standard java 
character-conversion stuff (ideally java.nio.charset but possibly 
gnu.gcj.convert since the former isn't really complete/tested yet), but 
with a fast path to use the JvGetStringUTF etc in the UTF8 case. In 
turn, gnu.gcj.convert or java.nio.charset API may have providers that 
wrap iconv or the windows APIs on systems where they exist.

> In conclusion, shall I just cash in my chips, not touch cni.h and
> simply submit a patch for jvm.h which uses the existing CNI
> functions?

Sounds good. Meanwhile I'll see if I can come up with a prototype 
StringConverter implementation, for discussion.

Regards

Bryce.