XCode Compiler Fail

Now this is just ridiculous

While I’ve been encountering more bugs than I can count on both hands while working with XCode, this one takes the cake. Clang (the compiler) was throwing the following errors while it was trying to compile one of its objective C source files (.m extension).

clang: error: unable to execute command: Segmentation fault: 11
clang: error: clang frontend command failed due to signal (use -v to see invocation)
Apple LLVM version 7.0.2 (clang-700.1.81)
Target: arm-apple-darwin14.5.0
Thread model: posix
clang: note: diagnostic msg: PLEASE submit a bug report to http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/ and include the crash backtrace, preprocessed source, and associated run script.
clang: error: unable to execute command: Segmentation fault: 11
clang: note: diagnostic msg: Error generating preprocessed source(s).

The fix... was to keep the specific source file open in an XCode window ~.~ . How the heck do you integrate the [CLI] compiler so much into the IDE that this could happen? Or is this simply a weird file system thing? I should note that my XCode project directory, with all files, is located on a VMware volume share.

UTF8 fix for iOS mail

Thanks apple</sarcasm>

Nowadays, it just makes sense to do everything in utf8 from the start. Most everything of consequence now supports it, it keeps byte count down for most anyone using an alphabet that is primarily latin, it is compatible with a old of older software, and can help lead to some useful shortcuts in programming. A very good number of libraries and languages even assume it as the default character encoding now.

It’s especially nice for html and web pages, so content can just be pasted in as-is, except of course for single and double quotes (which I always replace with ’ “ ” anyways) and < > &. However, I was recently thrown for a loop when my utf8 encoding was not being read correctly in Apple’s iOS mail client. After lots of testing and research, I came to the conclusion that it just plain doesn’t support utf-8 by default! I think I read somewhere you have to install foreign language packs to make it available, but that doesn’t help our normal latin-based-alphabet users.

The simple solution for diacritic (and other html encodable) characters is to just encode them as html: (only supported for php>=5.3.4)

function EncodeForIOS($String) //This assumes the following characters are already encoded (line 2): & < >
{
	$MailHTMLConvertArray=get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8');
	unset($MailHTMLConvertArray['&'], $MailHTMLConvertArray['<'], $MailHTMLConvertArray['>']);
	return strtr($String, $MailHTMLConvertArray);
}