> On 06 Jun 2016, at 17:22, Sabine Manaa <manaa.sab...@gmail.com> wrote: > > why ByteArray?
http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html A Unicode transformation format (UTF) is an algorithmic mapping from every Unicode code point (except surrogate code points) to a unique byte sequence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8 encodes each of the 1,112,064 valid code points in the Unicode code space (1,114,112 code points minus 2,048 surrogate code points) using one to four 8-bit bytes (a group of 8 bits is known as an octet in the Unicode Standard). In Pharo https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/EnterprisePharoBook/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/book-result/Zinc-Encoding-Meta/Zinc-Encoding-Meta.html Of course, given a ByteArray, whose values are all between 0 and 255 by definition, you can convert it to a ByteString. That String is not a correct (Pharo) String anymore, it is like converting a PNG or JPEG to String, you can do it, it is just wrong. When talking to the outside world, be it over a network connection, or via primitive calls, anything but pure ASCII strings need an encoding. This has to be agreed upon by both parties. If the receiving party wants UTF-8 forced into a (kind of) String, that is (still) possible. Your initial solution seems to indicate that this is expected. This (ugly) conversion should be done at an as low level as possible, IMHO. Sven
