Proposal: Functions for converting from and to character (UTF-16) codes

[brodo]

I am using node-red to talk to IoT devices via modbus and so far I could use jsonata for all data transformation necessary. However, today I needed to convert between characters and their character codes. JavaScript has the String.fromCharCode(INT) and STRING.charCodeAt() functions for that. It would be nice to expose these to jsonata. Maybe as $charCode() and $fromCharCode(). I am willing to do a PR for that. However, before I put any effort into it I would like to know if you guys are interested in it.

[michaelthoward]

+1

Note that while this request refers to "ASCII" character code, I think it is understood to mean "UTF-16 Code Unit" or "UTF-16 Unit" for compatibility with JavaScript String.fromCharCode(INT) and STRING.charCodeAt()

[brodo]

@michaelthoward I changed it in the title now.

[andrew-coleman]

Thanks for the proposal. I think there might be a common theme here with some of the discussion in #80 (Proposal: Function(s) for casting string-encoded binary data to numeric values) and #171 (proposal: $string should work with Node.js' Buffer). I'd like to consider all of these together with your proposal #200 (Proposal: Functions for doing binary and, or, xor, not and shifting) to make sure we deliver a set of consistent capabilities. As @xogeny suggests, this might be a good candidate for an extension package designed specifically for these IoT type use-cases.

Given that, I'd like to put your pull requests #198 and #199 on hold for a bit.