Re: iconv()

On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 11:18:28PM +1300, Carey Evans wrote:
> "Jason M. Felice" <jasonf@Baldwingroup.COM> writes:
> 
>  > What was the problem with not getting iconv() to work for us?  Am I wrong 
>on
>  > any of my above points?
> 
> At least with the glibc 2.1 iconv(), error handling is very poor.  If
> it encounters a character it can't translate, it errors out without
> any way to recover.

Hmm, is that a design or implementation issue?

> 
> There are also some advantages to the tables that recode generates.
> In the case of codepage 273 for German, codepoint 0xbc is an "overline"
> (Unicode 0x203e), which isn't part of ISO-8859-1.  It looks the same
> as a "macron" (ISO-8859-1 character 0xaf) though, which is what recode
> uses.

The aforementioned libiconv claims to map characters to similar-looking
characters when it can't map them directly.

> 
> There's also no way to use iconv() to convert to whatever the local
> multibyte encoding is, unless we know what it is in advance.  We can
> probably assume UTF-8 if going for internationalisation, although who
> knows what wchar_t is?

Think think think think.... there should be no way to determine whether the
current console font is iso-8859-1 or some other, huh?  Except for the
locale, if they have that set, maybe?  Humm...

> 
> I think the main obstacle to using iconv() was that nobody had it
> available to test last February when we were discussing it, so nothing
> got done.
> 
> (BTW, I have a mostly complete archive of the linux5250 mailing list
> going back to 20 Nov 1998.  Does anyone want to put it up on the web
> somewhere?)
> 

-Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice
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