8bit strings Fixup

[Peter Johnson]

Committed a slightly modified version as r1677.  The new code is safer, 
but I'm a bit surprised that your C compiler converts signed char to 
unsigned long using sign extension--I definitely don't see that behavior 
in GCC.  What compiler are you using?

Thanks,
Peter

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Here is a fixup for 8bit strings cleanness: casting into _unsigned_ char
> is needed for values greater than 127, because else the cast into long
> expands the sign bit, resulting to strange output.
>
> Samuel
>