xml-dev - Character and byte offsets

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

> Secondly, for proximity, you're worried about counting characters, not 
> bytes, but for addressing back into the entity, you're worried about byte, 
> not character, offsets.  So it's even harder than it looks.

This reminds me - are there good techniques for maintaining a byte
offset in conjunction with character-set translations?  Ideally you
want the translation done in big blocks at a low level, but then how
do you access the byte offsets?  In RXP/LTXML I keep the offset of the
start of the block (which is actually a line), and then (in the case
of UTF-8) effectively reverse-translate to calculate how much to add
(this relies on UTF-8 being invertible).  Surely there must be a better
way...

-- Richard

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)