Manual:Unicode

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Revision as of 06:06, 25 July 2020 by Vadi (talk | contribs) (→‎Changing encoding: Remove outdated text)
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Unicode

Changing encoding

Mudlet is being developed to support displaying text in many languages but how the characters that conveys that language varies between MUDs as does the languages they support. Plain vanilla Telnet actually only supports the 96-characters of ASCII by default, but other language can be supported if the way that they are converted into 8-bit bytes can be agreed upon by the use of what is called encoding - setting Mudlet (and the MUD server if approriate) to the correct encoding allows the correct display of characters like the Spanish ñ, the Russian я, and all other letters (or more properly grapheme).

Go to Preferences > General to set the encoding:

Prefer UTF-8 if your game supports it.

The list of encodings supported by Mudlet is:

Encoding Mudlet version
ASCII 0.0.1
UTF-8 3.2.0
ISO 8859-1 0.0.1
CP850 3.2.0
CP866 3.2.0
CP874 3.2.0
ISO 8859-10 3.2.0
ISO 8859-11 3.2.0
ISO 8859-13 3.2.0
ISO 8859-14 3.2.0
ISO 8859-15 3.2.0
ISO 8859-16 3.2.0
ISO 8859-2 3.2.0
ISO 8859-3 3.2.0
ISO 8859-4 3.2.0
ISO 8859-5 3.2.0
ISO 8859-6 3.2.0
ISO 8859-7 3.2.0
ISO 8859-8 3.2.0
ISO 8859-9 3.2.0
KOI8-R 3.2.0
KOI8-U 3.2.0
MACINTOSH 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1250 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1251 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1252 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1253 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1254 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1255 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1256 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1257 3.2.0
WINDOWS-1258 3.2.0

Scripting with Unicode

Mudlet uses English in all of its Lua API to enable scripts scripts to be international - so a script written on a computer with German default will work on a computer with English default, for example. This means you can expect all API functions, error messages to be in English, and the number separator is always a period . Mudlet sets os.setlocale("C") by default, see background.

Not all Lua functions beginning with string. will work with Unicode - Mudlet has utf8. equivalents for those. See String functions in Mudlet for a complete list. For example:

print(string.len("слово"))
> 10 -- wrong!
print(utf8.len("слово"))
> 5  -- correct!

Triggering with Unicode

Mudlet's trigger engine fully supports Unicode in all types of patterns, including regex. Here is an example of (\w+) matching a Cyrillic word:

Mudlet unicode trigger highlight.png

Loading external Lua files

Mudlet uses Unicode (utf8) for the trigger engine and Lua subsystem. If you have a file you're loading externally with Lua, make sure it saved in utf8 encoding.