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[ Charset ISO-8859-1 unsupported, converting... ]
> On 2003.12.18 10:30 Ed Hartnett wrote:
> > Howdy HDF5 Guys!
> >
> > When will Unicode be supported in HDF5?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Ed
> >
>
> What does this entail? I'm assuming this is that same as HDF string types,
> with all the features. The only difference is the encoding and the width of
> charaters.
>
> What about unicode H5T_CHAR class?
Probably not.
> I would think the work is:
>
> * an official HDF name for a sub-class of H5T_STRING, whatever is needed
> to support that
We currently have a 'H5T_cset_t' enum (with only H5T_CSET_ASCII defined
currently) for setting the character set encoded in a string (with the
H5Tset_cset routine), so I wouldn't make a new class of string, I would just
add the new character set encoding.
> * conversion between ASCII and Unicode?
> * tests
> * update dumper and other key tools
The rest of this is sensible.
> Is there anything else?
We are waving around the term "Unicode" like we know what it means and I'm
pretty certain it is more complex than we think. This article gives a
reasonable overview from a software developer's position:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
We should decide which character sets we are going to try to support and
then find some open source software which performs conversions between ASCII
and Unicode strings - I don't think we want to be in that business.
Quincey
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