An XFN composite name consists of an ordered list of zero or more components. Each component is a string name from the namespace of a single naming system. It may be an atomic or a compound name in that namespace.

XFN defines an abstract data type, FN_composite_name_t, for representing the structural form of a composite name. XFN also defines a standard string form for composite names. This form is the concatenation of the components of a composite name from left to right with the XFN component separator ('/') character to separate each component.

These are the interfaces:

#include <xfn/xfn.h> FN_composite_name_t *fn_composite_name_from_string( const FN_string_t *str); FN_string_t *fn_string_from_composite_name( const FN_composite_name_t *name);

The function fn_composite_name_from_string parses the string representation of a composite name into its corresponding composite name object FN_composite_name_t. The function fn_string_from_composite_name composes the string representation of a composite name given its composite name object form FN_composite_name_t.

Special characters used in the XFN composite name syntax, such as the separator or escape characters, have the same encoding as they would in ISO 646.

All XFN implementations are required to support the portable representation, ISO 646. All other representations are optional.

All characters of the string form of a XFN composite name use a single encoding. This does not preclude component names of a composite name in its structural form from having different encodings. Code set mismatches that occur during the process of coverting a composite name structure to its string form are resolved in an implementation-dependent way. When an implementation discovers that a composite name has components with incompatible code sets, it returns the error code FN_E_INCOMPATIBLE_CODE_SETS.

FN_string_t(3XFN), FN_compound_name_t(3XFN), xfn(3XFN)