ruby / ruby/rdoc

Convention to include non-ASCII characters in C comments

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Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
930
Forks
465
Avg merge
3d 10h
Merged PRs (30d)
27

Description

For some classes and methods, it would be great if non-ASCII characters could be included in rdoc documentation. One example would be String#upcase/downcase/swapcase/capitalize, which newly work for all of Unicode.

For Ruby files, this should already work, because these files are UTF-8 by default nowadays.

However, for C source, there is a problem: There are still C compilers that bark at non-ASCII characters/bytes in C source. This would mean that we need some kind of escaping convention. One obvious choice would be HTML/XML escapes (ü).

If there's already a solution for this, I'd appreciate to know. If not, I'll be glad to contribute.

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by inspecting how RDoc reads C source comments and how it currently escapes text for generated documentation. Determine whether an existing convention handles non-ASCII characters; done requires an agreed convention that preserves such characters in RDoc output without breaking C compilation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c, ruby
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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