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* What exactly is chinese-big5?
@ 2008-04-17 11:15 Eli Zaretskii
  2008-04-18  1:32 ` Kenichi Handa
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 8+ messages in thread
From: Eli Zaretskii @ 2008-04-17 11:15 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Kenichi Handa; +Cc: emacs-devel

Emacs 22.2 supports the chinese-big5 encoding.  However, I cannot find
anywhere the precise description of which flavor(s) of BIG5 is/are
supported.  The Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big5 describes
half a dozen of extensions to the original Big5 encoding, so it would
be good to know which one(s) we support.

The specific situation where I needed to know this was when I was
handed a file with what was supposed to be Chinese text and was asked
to convert it to UTF-8.  detect-coding-region suggested chinese-big5
as the only Chinese encoding for the non-ASCII characters in the file,
so I tried that.  Interestingly enough, both `recode' and `iconv'
refused to convert the file, no matter what flavor of Big5 (including
cp950) I tried, but Emacs read the file with no problems and produced
what seems like a valid UTF-8 encoding.  `iconv' 1.12 supports quite a
few Big5 flavors, but they all choked on some characters in the file.

So what exactly is chinese-big5 in Emacs, and how come it succeeds
where the latest `iconv' fails?  In particular, should I worry about
possibly incorrect conversion by Emacs, where `iconv' barfs (the file
is very large and I cannot proofread all the converted strings)?

TIA




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2008-04-18 15:52 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2008-04-17 11:15 What exactly is chinese-big5? Eli Zaretskii
2008-04-18  1:32 ` Kenichi Handa
2008-04-18  8:16   ` Eli Zaretskii
2008-04-18 11:28     ` Kenichi Handa
2008-04-18 12:47       ` Eli Zaretskii
2008-04-18 13:37         ` Jason Rumney
2008-04-18 15:52           ` Eli Zaretskii
2008-04-18 13:26       ` Jason Rumney

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