Re: EBCDIC <-> ASCII translation tables

[Carey Evans <c.evans@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jason Felice <jfelice@cronosys.com> writes:

> Is there a quick-and-dirty way to translate from iso-8859-x to UCS-x? 
> Something like twiddling the high eight bits according to the `x' in
> iso-8859-`x' and setting the low eight bits to the iso-8859-x character?

No, except for ISO-8859-1.  The others would have to be done by lookup
tables (or iconv(), recode or similar).

[...]

> Hmm, I don't know enough about this, but what about the Kanji?  I
> don't beleive most Asian languages are mapped in UCS-2...  If that's
> not the case, then UCS-2 is fine by me.  For the time being 16 bits
> is fine by me anyway, since if we end up needing the extra 16 bits,
> moving from 16 to 32 bits isn't as big a deal as moving from
> EBCDIC-8 internal storage to UTFxx (testing for orders, for example,
> will have to be changed).

There's a lot of useful information about character sets at
http://czyborra.com/, such as the Unicode information at
http://czyborra.com/unicode/characters.html.

It looks like almost all the currently used characters are in the
Basic Multilingual Plane, which is just the first 16 bits of Unicode.
Most of the remaining planes haven't been defined, although I guess if
IBM decides to support Klingon (U-000123D0 to U-000123F9) then we'd
need to add full 32-bit support.

-- 
         Carey Evans  http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/c.evans/

    We have full klingon console support just in case
                                        -- Alan Cox on linux-kernel
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