i've switched the forums charset to utf-8

this may mess up chars with code points in the range u0080-u00FF in existing posts (it really depends what browsers do when the specifed encoding is utf-8 but the text cannot be decoded as such)

however it should also allow use off the full range of chars in posts

Ωμ€

How do we get omega and squared then??

Not another new toy    

Start, all progs, accessories, system tools,  character map. and just copy them paste.

Ş©®ǖƒƒ

Well I never knew you could do that! 14 years with a pc and I'd always wondered how people managed to get the Ohms sign!

TT

How many chars are there in UTF-8? Do they all have ascii codes? Is ascii a different charset?

Here ya Billy - it'll keep ya busy for hours mate -

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

RR

ascii (american standard code for information interchage) is a 7 bit code which can represent most normal text

however almost all computers used 8 bit bytes and the high charachtors were given meanings which varied with time language and vendor

some languages (chineese japaneese korean) had so many charachtors that multi byte encodings had to be added

versions of windows world in western countries generally settled on iso-8859-1 (often refered to as iso latin 1)

unicode was introduced to provide a standard for representing all charachtors in a single charset

unicode seperated the idea of code point assignment and encoding into bytes for transmission. when it was first introduced it was thought that 65536 code points u0000 to uFFFF would be sufficiant but later this proved not to be the case and we now have a system with code points from u00000000 to u10FFFF the original 16 bit range is refered to as the basic multilingual plane and is all that is needed for most current languages (higher codes are needed for things like hyroglphics and some very specialist mathematical stuff)

the first 256 code points in unicode represent the 256 charachtors possible in iso-8859-1

unicode can be encoded into bytes in several ways


utf-8 a variable length encodeing into 8 bit bytes. the first 128 code points are represented by themselves (making this a superset of 7 bit ascii) higher code points are represented by multi byte sequences.
utf-16 code points in the basic multilingual are represented directly as 16 bit integers higher code points are represented by a pair of surrogate pairs of charachters from a reserved range.
utf-32 all code points are represented directly as 32 bit integers

there are others too but they are pretty rare

utf-16 and utf-32 have both big endian and little endian varieties which may be indicated by a b or l suffix or by a byte order mark which is code point FEFF this is a zero width non breaking space and the byteswap of its code FFFE is not considered a valid code point so from this the decoder can deduce the byte order

utf-8's property of being a superset of 7 bit ascii is usefull in switchover and this combined with the encodings efficiancy for mostly ascii text have lead to it being the most common way of encoding unicode for transmission

-- --- .-. .   - .... .- -.   .-- .... .- -   .--. .-.. . .- ... ..- .-. .   -- ---.. ..--..   - .... .. -. -.-   --- ..-.   .- .-.. .-..   - .... .   --- - .... . .-.   - .... .. -. --. ...   -.-- --- ..- .-.   ..-. .. -. --. . .-. ...   -.-. --- ..- .-.. -..   -... .   -.. --- .. -. --.   --- - .... . .-.   - .... .- -.   - -.-- .--. .. -. --.   -.. --- - ...   .- -. -..   -.. .- ... .... . ...   .-.. -- .- ---

I worked on a project team some 10 years ago where the product had to be converted to work in Japanese.

We hired in a Japanese lady to work as a consultant. She told us various stories as follows.

There are something like 8,000 regular characters in the Japanese common language, and far more than that specialised characters. You wouldn't get your keyboard thru the front door for that lot!

Children apparently cannot read a newspaper until they are about 15 or so, when they've grasped enough of the characters to make sense of it all.

When someone is telling (or listening to) a joke in Japan it's apparently normal for no emotions to be shown on the recipients face until the punchline has been spoken. Because of the construct of the language the preceding paragraph doesn't make any sense until the last few words put it into context. The teller could apparently be announcing the death of his beloved, or telling a real corker.

When a japanese businessman hands you his business card it is considered highly insulting if you don't take the time to read it fully. Most of us put business cards into our pocket after so much as a cursory glance..

She could have been telling us a load of old porkies, but it sounded good.

HM