Re: Mix encodings in a document?

John Cowan (cowan@locke.ccil.org)
Wed, 23 Sep 1998 11:02:59 -0400


Deke Smith asked about Gavin Thomas Nicol's remark:

> >Remember: byte != character code != character != glyph

A character code may be more than one byte long, but is always
an integer. A character is an abstract object which can be
represented by different character codes in different coded
character sets (ASCII, EBCDIC/US, JIS X 0208, etc.)

Glyphs are abstractions of *appearance*, whereas characters are
abstractions of *function*.

> ISO-10646-UCS-2
> ISO-10646-UCS-4
> ISO-10646-UTF-1
> ISO-10646-Unicode-Latin1
> ISO-10646-J-1
> UNICODE-1-1
> UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7
> UTF-7
> UTF-8

ISO-10646-UCS-2 is near enough UTF-16; UTF-16 only implies that
surrogates are correctly processed, and decent UCS-2 implementations
will at worst leave surrogates alone.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)