Re: KVC

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 5 Jun 2007, at 23:14, Chris Farber wrote:

> On May 31, 2007, at 4:20 PM, Helge Hess wrote:
>
> > Ok,
> >
> > found another thing ;-) GNUstep KVC breaks with Unicode keys! Eg:
> >
> >   [self takeValue:urks forKey:@"Helge Heß"];
> >
> > produces an exception because the ß can't be converted to ASCII. I  
> > recommend switching the conversion to UTF-8.
>
> I don't believe this is an issue, as you cannot use unicode for  
> variables or method names.
>
> > Please remember that KVC is not just for accessing methods but for  
> > arbitary key/value combinations.
>
> Perhaps you are thinking of NSMutableDictionary? KVC is only for  
> setting properties via appropriately named methods or direct access  
> to instance variables.

Good point ... using non-ascii keys cannot ever work.

However, we should try to make sure that the mode of failure matches  
that of the MacOS-X implementation ... what does MacOS-X do when it  
is given an unusable key?  Since Helge raised this issue, my guess is  
that MacOS-X fails quietly in some way rather than raising an  
exception.  Changing the code to use UTF-8 as he suggests might be  
the best way to mimic MacOS-X behavior.

Anyway, the first step is to write some testcases for using the  
various KVC methods with non-ascii keys and run them on MacOS-X to  
see how they 'should' perform.  After that you may want to modify  
GNUstep-base to match where necessary. .