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- Start Date: 2014-11-05 | ||
- RFC PR: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/446 | ||
- Rust Issue: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/19739 | ||
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# Summary | ||
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Remove `\u203D` and `\U0001F4A9` unicode string escapes, and add | ||
[ECMAScript 6-style](https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-escapes#unicode-code-point) | ||
`\u{1F4A9}` escapes instead. | ||
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# Motivation | ||
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The syntax of `\u` followed by four hexadecimal digits dates from when Unicode | ||
was a 16-bit encoding, and only went up to U+FFFF. | ||
`\U` followed by eight hex digits was added as a band-aid | ||
when Unicode was extended to U+10FFFF, | ||
but neither four nor eight digits particularly make sense now. | ||
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Having two different syntaxes with the same meaning but that apply | ||
to different ranges of values is inconsistent and arbitrary. | ||
This proposal unifies them into a single syntax that has a precedent | ||
in ECMAScript a.k.a. JavaScript. | ||
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# Detailed design | ||
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In terms of the grammar in [The Rust Reference]( | ||
http://doc.rust-lang.org/reference.html#character-and-string-literals), | ||
replace: | ||
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``` | ||
unicode_escape : 'u' hex_digit 4 | ||
| 'U' hex_digit 8 ; | ||
``` | ||
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with | ||
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``` | ||
unicode_escape : 'u' '{' hex_digit+ 6 '}' | ||
``` | ||
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That is, `\u{` followed by one to six hexadecimal digits, followed by `}`. | ||
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The behavior would otherwise be identical. | ||
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## Migration strategy | ||
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In order to provide a graceful transition from the old `\uDDDD` and | ||
`\UDDDDDDDD` syntax to the new `\u{DDDDD}` syntax, this feature | ||
should be added in stages: | ||
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* Stage 1: Add support for the new `\u{DDDDD}` syntax, without removing | ||
previous support for `\uDDDD` and `\UDDDDDDDD`. | ||
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* Stage 2: Warn on occurrences of `\uDDDD` and `\UDDDDDDDD`. Convert | ||
all library code to use `\u{DDDDD}` instead of the old syntax. | ||
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* Stage 3: Remove support for the old syntax entirely (preferably | ||
during a separate release from the one that added the warning from | ||
Stage 2). | ||
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# Drawbacks | ||
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* This is a breaking change and updating code for it manually is annoying. | ||
It is however very mechanical, and we could provide scripts to automate it. | ||
* Formatting templates already use curly braces. | ||
Having multiple curly braces pairs in the same strings that have a very | ||
different meaning can be surprising: | ||
`format!("\u{e8}_{e8}", e8 = "é")` would be `"è_é"`. | ||
However, there is a precedent of overriding characters: | ||
`\` can start an escape sequence both in the Rust lexer for strings | ||
and in regular expressions. | ||
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# Alternatives | ||
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* Status quo: don’t change the escaping syntax. | ||
* Add the new `\u{…}` syntax, but also keep the existing `\u` and `\U` syntax. | ||
This is what ES 6 does, but only to keep compatibility with ES 5. | ||
We don’t have that constaint pre-1.0. | ||
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# Unresolved questions | ||
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None so far. |