From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jan 03 2003 - 21:18:15 EST
--- "j.m.maurer" <j.m.maurer@student.utwente.nl>
wrote: > Op vr 03-01-2003, om 22:17 schreef Dom
Lachowicz:
> > I'll re-enable the UCS2 methods on the UCS4 and
> UTF8
> > string classes and simply remove the UCS2 string
> class
> > and other silly ucs2 functions.
> >
>
> Great! That's all I need (and should be needed)
Sorry for any trouble and/or confusion guys (:
One of the main reasons I wanted to get rid of the
UCS-2 stuff (or deprecate it at least) is that there
is a *huge* amount of confusion between UCS-2 and
UTF-16. They look compatible but they are not.
In some major contexts the names are misused -
especially by Microsoft who always call both UCS-2 and
UTF-16 "UCS-2"! Java also seems to be in a grey area
by calling it UCS-2 but nobody really knowing which
encoding it in fact supports. C# seems to have
followed in the footsteps of Java ):
If you think you have a use for UCS-2, please do *all*
you can to find whether you really need UCS-2 or
UTF-16. The difference is that UCS-2 can only handle
65,536 characters whereas UTF-16 can handle all that
Unicode can handle. UTF-16 does this by encoding some
characters as two 16-bit units. These are known as
surrogate pairs. The area of Unicode covered by UCS-2
is known as the BMP or Basic Multilingual Plane.
Find out if WordPerfect supports non-BMP characters or
not. If it does then we need new UTF-16 functions or
a new UTF-16 class. (we don't really - just use the
UCS-4 or UTF-8 classes and convert using UT_iconv in
the places you need to).
To find out whether WordPerfect uses UTF-16, Google
should turn up some test documents or pages that you
ought to be able to import into WordPerfect. Then
save them as native WordPerfect files and reopen them.
If they are identical then WordPerfect actually
supports UTF-16 and not UCS-2!
Using the two interchangeable can and will corrupt
your
data! Also note that in my experience AbiWord cannot
yet handle characters outside the BMP at all, at least
on Unix ):
Hope this makes some sense (:
Andrew Dunbar.
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
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