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NetHack Development Team Polls Community For Advice On Unicode

Posted by timothy on from the pressing-issues dept.

An anonymous reader writes After years of relative silence, the development team behind the classic roguelike game NetHack has posteda question: going forward, what internal representation should the NetHack core use for Unicode characters? UTF8? UTF32? Something else? (See also: NH4 blog, reddit. Also, yes, I have verified that the question authentically comes from the NetHack dev team.)

1 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. UTF-8 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    UTF-8 is easily adopted by C based software like Nethack because null-terminated string logic works unmodified; a UTF-8 string has no embedded nulls to trip up any code that that measures string length by searching for a zero byte. For the most part things should "just work." UTF-16 and 32 strings have zero bytes embedded among characters, so you have to audit every bit of code to ensure compatibility.