[Debburn-devel] Sample mini-iconv (Was: What can I assume about libc?

[Albert Cahalan]

On 10/4/06, Peter Samuelson <peter at p12n.org> wrote:

> I.e., the following code.  It's completely untested, I just hacked it
> up tonight.  Does it look like a useful API?  Does anyone see any
> obvious (or not obvious) bugs?

By eyeball, it looks pretty good. The data types and
validation are especially nice. My two concerns are:

The "in" parameter is used in a way which prevents easy
use of an array. The user must create a pointer, often for
no use other than to satisfy the function being called.
The extra information is unlikely to be all that useful.

The "len" parameter might be a hazard. It seems to be
in terms of the number of input characters. Usually the
more important concern is the number of output bytes.
People may be tempted to use 2*n to allocate space
for n characters when the output is UTF-16, which would
allow for buffer overflows. Perhaps it is best to have both
input characters and output bytes specified.

Since these functions are memcpy-like (good IMHO),
some strlen-like functions may also be needed.

BTW, for the Windows port one might define UNICODE.
I believe this gets you all the OS interfaces in UTF-16.
Then you can go direct to Joliet from there, and you
don't need to care about 1-byte "OEM" cruft.