Re: A few questions on parsing, sockets, UTF-8 strings

[john@peppermind.com]

On Thursday, August 11, 2016 at 6:49:33 PM UTC+1, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> ASCII string is an UTF-8 string. The reverse if false.

You're right, Ascii uses only 0...127 as code points. But I thought that Ada fixed strings hold one byte per character, meaning that I can store UTF-8 in it? Am I mistaken about that?

> > So if I Base64 encode this directly, do I have to care about UTF-8?
> 
> No, if it is strictly ASCII. Yes, if you are going to use other Unicode 
> code points.

Sorry for being such a noob, but I still don't get it. If GNAT GPS is set to UTF-8 (-gnatW8 for gnatmake and source encoding in GPS preferences), doesn't that mean that if I enter a Unicode character into a fixed string literal (just String, not Wide_String or Wide_Wide_String) that the string will contain this character in the form of as many bytes as the Unicode code point requires? So if it's a two-byte UTF-8 code point, then the string will contain two bytes?

In that case, as long as I don't need to access single characters ever, could I stick with fixed strings?