Re: My Querry

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Nov 23 2004 - 22:49:21 CST

  • Next message: John Cowan: "Re: My Querry"

    Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:

    > By saying UTF-8 is fully compatible with ASCII, it says that any
    > ASCII-only encoded file needs no reencoding of its bytes to make it
    > UTF-8.
    >
    > Note that this is only true for the US version of ASCII (well, "ASCII"
    > is normally designating only the last standard US variant of ISO 646,
    > other standard national variants or proprietary variants of ISO 646
    > should not be named ASCII, but more accurately, for example, "ISO
    > 646-FR:1989", or without the ISO prefix if this is a proprietary
    > charset and not an approved charset published in the ISO 646
    > standard).

    In other words:

    1. UTF-8 is fully compatible with ASCII, often called "US-ASCII" for
    emphasis, the truly "American" version of ISO 646. (The original
    "USASCII" was ASCII-1965, which differs from modern ASCII.)

    2. Other "national" versions of ISO 646 exist, such as the French
    version Philippe mentioned. They are no longer in heavy use, but they
    do exist. They are sometimes called "national variants of ASCII," which
    is confusing because of what the "A" in "ASCII" means. These are also
    7-bit charsets, but are not compatible with ASCII and thus not with
    UTF-8.

    Philippe got everything right in these two paragraphs, as far as I could
    tell, but for some reason I found the terminology a bit confusing.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



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