String operations

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; and to Harlequin MultiRIP but not Harlequin Core

Historically, 8‐bit character encoding schemes were platform‐ and language‐dependent, and no single encoding scheme was capable of coping with the full range of possible characters from multiple non‐ Latin languages.

Global Graphics has therefore introduced a proprietary encoding method, which is referred to in this document as the Harlequin encoding scheme (HES). The HES has the following characteristics:

• Single‐byte characters are in the range 0 –126 for single characters (127 is an escape byte).
• Multi‐byte characters are 4 bytes long, of which the first byte has a value of 128 –255
• Encoded sequences do not include null bytes. Standard string‐handling functions, such as

strcpy() , can therefore be used safely.

• To ensure that character boundaries are properly respected, multi‐byte strings must always be examined by reading forwards only.

The PFI includes a number of interfaces which are designed to make operations using HES strings much easier.