[Mono-list] Need help with DllImport (P/Invoke) and UCS-4 unicode

[Miguel de Icaza]

> How should I solve the issue? Has Mono some generic solution for the
> general issue of UCS-4 vs. UCS-2 unicode or do I have to convert the
> stuff manually by wrapping every external method? If I have to convert
> it manually is System.Text.Encoding.UTF32 the right module?

Sadly, you have to do it manually.

We brought this up a few times at ECMA and three or four times with
different people at Microsoft and we did not get very far.     The
solution is trivial, and we could implement it in Mono (expand the
CharSet definition to include UTF8, UCS4 explicit encodings), but it
would not be compatible with .NET, so we decided against doing it.

The best we managed to do was to get CharSet.ImplementationSpecific1 and
CharSet.ImplementationSpecific2 in ECMA, but these did not make it into
the .NET product.   This makes them completely useless.

One of the use cases that we had in mind at the time was precisely
PythonNet.

Miguel.