How do I check a string for non-ASCII characters efficiently?

Hi everyone,

here's my problem: My script renames the object it is in on a regular basis, to a user-defined name, and then says something in local chat (it's an emoter-type script). But of course object names can't contain non-ASCII characters, so I have to check for that or else SL prints out a bunch of ?????? instead of the object name I set in chat.

What I'm using right now is this:

llSetObjectName(newname);
if(llGetObjectName() != newname)
llOwnerSay("The chosen name contains non-ASCII characters";

This works, but it strikes me as kinda inelegant, and inefficient, plus it relies on undocumented behaviour (I have no way of knowing if llGetObjectName() != newname will always be TRUE if newname contains non-ASCII chars, and always FALSE otherwise).

Right now I could only think of checking once on change of newname and caching the result to improve efficiency, but that still doesn't deal with the using undocumented behavior problem.

Is there a better way?

Cheers
T.

I don't see the problem. The test works because names can't have non-ascii characters in them. If they fix that, the test will break, but then the name won't be a problem any more.

actually that seems much more brilliant than the parse drop I was going to suggest (parse out all ascii chars and test for length = 0)... and this way if they DO change the field to accept new characters then it should upgrade gracefully.