[whatwg] API for encoding/decoding ArrayBuffers into text

[Kenneth Russell]

Joshua Bell has been working on a string encoding and decoding API
that supports the needed encodings, and which is separable from the
core typed array API:

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/StringEncoding

This is the direction I prefer. String encoding and decoding seems to
be a complex enough problem that it should be expressed separately
from the typed array spec itself.

-Ken


On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 5:59 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2012, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>
>> Something that has come up a couple of times with content authors
>> lately has been the desire to convert an ArrayBuffer (or part thereof)
>> into a decoded string. Similarly being able to encode a string into an
>> ArrayBuffer (or part thereof).
>>
>> Something as simple as
>>
>> DOMString decode(ArrayBufferView source, DOMString encoding);
>> ArrayBufferView encode(DOMString source, DOMString encoding,
>> [optional] ArrayBufferView destination);
>>
>> would go a very long way. The question is where to stick these
>> functions. Internationalization doesn't have a obvious object we can
>> hang functions off of (unlike, for example crypto), and the above
>> names are much too generic to turn into global functions.
>
> Shouldn't this just be another ArrayBufferView type with special
> semantics, like Uint8ClampedArray? DOMStringArray or some such? And/or a
> getString()/setString() method pair on DataView?
>
> Incidentally I _strongly_ suggest we only support UTF-8 here.
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'