utf-8 , where utf is short for unicode transformation format, is a method of encoding unicode characters using one to four bytes per character. It is a superset of ascii, uses easily-distinguishable context-free prefixes to disinguish the beginning of each character, and can be probabilistically differentiated from legacy extended ascii encodings.
Internally, Tcl uses modified utf-8 encoding, which is the same as utf-8 except that the NUL character (\u0000) is encoded as the bytes 0xC0 0x80, which is not a valid utf-8 sequence. Since there are no nulls in such a string the C-string property that a null byte terminates the string may be preserved.
DKF: Here's a little utility procedure I wrote today when I needed to convert the utf-8 encoding a unicode character into a sequence hexadecimal digits to use as a literal value in C:
proc toutf8 c {
set s [encoding convertto utf-8 $c]
binary scan $s cu* x
format [string repeat \\x%02x [string length $s]] {*}$x
}Demonstrating:
% toutf8 \u1234 \xe1\x88\xb4 % toutf8 \u0000 \x00
ferrieux: May I suggest a slight enhancement of readability, and possibly performance, though not measured nor expecting much:
proc toutf8 c {
set s [encoding convertto utf-8 $c]
binary scan $s H* x
regsub -all -expanded {..} $x {\x&}
}The demonstrated output continues to be the same as shown above, as expected.
jima 2010-01-09: Does this work for unicode characters in the range U+010000 to U+10FFFF ?
According to [L1 ]
In my box
toutf8 \u10000
Produces
\xe1\x80\x80\x30
And (notice the extra 0 introduced here)
toutf8 \u010000
Produces
\xc4\x80\x30\x30
I have tested some codes in the other ranges defined in [L2 ] and everything seems fine whilst we don't put any extra zeroes at the beginning:
toutf8 \u20ac
Correctly produces
\xe2\x82\xac
Lars H, 2010-01-12 PYK 2020-07-22: No, Tcl can (currently) only represent characters within the basic multilingual plane of unicode, so there's no way that you can even feed an U+10000 character into encoding convertto :-(. Fixing that is non-trivial since some parts of the Tcl C library require a representation of strings where all characters take up the same number of bytes. It is possible to compile Tcl with that TCL_UTF_MAX set to 4, meaning 32 bits per character, but it's rather wasteful, and has been reported not entirely compatible with Tk.
What one can often make do with is using surrogate pairs for characters beyond the BMP, thus treating Tcl's strings as being the UTF-16 representations of the strings proper. This doesn't play well with encoding convertto utf-8 though, as that will reencode each surrogate in the pair as a separate character. Perhaps I should get around to doing something about that…
\u by design grabs no more than four hexadecimal digits, thus leaving extra zeroes alone, and would continue to do so even after Tcl is extended to support full unicode. This is so that you can put a hex digit immediately after a four-digit \u substitution, which is not possible with \x, which consumes as many hexadecimal digits as it finds. Possibly there would be an \U substitution for the full range. regexp already implements that, at least syntactically.
jima, 2010-01-13: Thanks Lars for the explanation.
Perhaps another side of this problem is that even if one is able to generate the right utf-8 (by coding the unicode to utf-8 conversion algorithm oneself), one won't get the proper graphical output unless the instructions to produce it are somewhere in the bellies of Tcl.
So (as I understand it), to display an image of the Unicode character U+10000, properly encoded internally as utf-8 as \xF0\x90\x80\x80, we would need extra information besides the algorithm depicted in the wikipedia page mentioned earlier.
Lars H, 2010-01-19, 2010-01-26: The graphical output always depends on what is supposed to be supplying it. Tk is probably difficult, but if you're rather generating text that some other program (e.g. a web browser) is supposed to render, then 4-byte UTF-8 sequences may be fine.
For what it's worth, I went ahead with the "surrogate pairs inside Tcl — 4-byte sequences outside" idea; the result so far can be found in the Half Bakery at http://wiki.tcl.tk/_repo/UTF/ . This is an C-coded extension (well, the files needed for one which are not the same as in the sampleextension), whose package name is UTF, and which defines a new encoding, "UTF-8" (upper case, whereas the built-in one is utf-8). Upon encoding convertfrom, this converts 4-byte sequences (code points U+10000 through U+10FFFF) to surrogate pairs, and upon encoding convertto it converts surrogate pairs to 4-byte sequences. There are even tests, which it passes! A previous version (from 2010-01-19) had a bug that caused it to get stuck in an infinite loop when used as a channel encoding, but the current seems to work fine.
A logical next step would be to also implement UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE as encodings (the Unicode built-in encoding is almost one of these, but it depends on the platform which one it is).
AMG: See [L3 ] for the UTF-16 encoding feature request.