[erlang-questions] trouble with erlang or erlang is a ghetto

[Bob Ippolito]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 6:26 PM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 07/28/2011 03:04 AM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:
>>> On 07/28/2011 02:01 AM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>>>> It might be interesting to run some sort of poll to see what currently
>>>> unsupported areas people care about most, particularly the people who
>>>> would say "I'd like to use Eiffel but I cannot because it does not
>>>> have library support for <whatever>."
>>>
>>> Proper Unicode support in Erlang would probably get many votes.
>>
>> UTF8 support works great these days, what else should you need? ;)
>
> You can output UTF8 as binary, yes. Maybe as strings too (I'm not really
> using those so I wouldn't know). But to give an example, can you search
> inside your UTF8 text for the word "trouvé" including all different
> variants of the é character (perhaps even just 'e')? Byte search isn't
> doing any good here.

It sounds like you want a unicode normalization library, I don't think
this is really a search problem. In Python you'd do this with the
unicodedata module. You're right that there is nothing that ships with
Erlang for this purpose, at least not that I know of. It seems like
this might be easy to solve in a third party library, maybe a binding
to ICU. At least one of these probably already exists.

-bob