From: Rick Cameron (Rick.Cameron@crystaldecisions.com)
Date: Thu Feb 13 2003 - 14:37:07 EST
The Win32 API includes a function that can do this folding, on Windows
NT/2000/XP: LCMapString, with the option LCMAP_SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE or
LCMAP_TRADITIONAL_CHINESE.
I know little about Chinese, but I have the impression that it is much more
common for several traditional characters to correspond to one simplified
character than vice versa. If that's true, it seems to me that it would make
most sense to fold to simplified.
- rick
-----Original Message-----
From: Marco Cimarosti [mailto:marco.cimarosti@essetre.it]
Sent: Thursday, 13 February 2003 11:13
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: RE: traditional vs simplified chinese
Paul wrote:
> To: Edward H Trager
> > Marco Cimarosti has questioned, why do you need to classify
> > text as being simplified or traditional?
>
> if i understand their needs correctly, its to implement a
> search system with search phrases of either "type" of
> chinese--content would be in both types.
Still, I don't see what's the purpose of "classifying" the user input. What
they really need is rather a special collation algorithm that *ignores* the
difference between corresponding traditional and simplified characters for
the purpose of searching. This is somewhat analogous to making a "caseless"
search.
The easiest way to do it is "folding" both the user's query and the content
being sought to the same form (either traditional or simplified, it doesn't
matter). It may also help to "fold" also other kinds of variants beside
simplified and traditional.
This "folding" is much easy that implementing a full-fledged
simplified<->traditional conversion (which needs to be context sensitive and
dictionary-driven), because the result is just in a temporary buffer used
for comparison, and no one is going to see it.
_ Marco
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