--- /dev/null
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head><title>Character encoding</title><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"></head><body>
+<h1 align="center">Character encoding</h1>
+<br>
+<h2>Index</h2>
+<ul>
+ <li><a href="#The_character_encoding_problem">The character encoding problem</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#Unicode">Unicode</a><br>
+ </li>
+</ul>
+<br>
+<hr width="100%" size="2">
+<h2><a name="The_character_encoding_problem"></a>The character encoding problem</h2>
+
+Developers are usually familiar with the ASCII character set. This
+is a character set that assigns a unique number to some characters, e.g.
+an "A" has ASCII code 65 (or 0x41 in hex), and an "a" has ASCII code 97 (or
+0x61 in hex). Some people may also have used ASCII codes for several
+drawing characters (such as a horizontal bar, a vertical bar, or a top-right
+corner) in the old DOS days, to be able to draw nice windows in text mode.<br>
+<br>
+
+However, these last characters are strictly spoken not part of the ASCII
+set. The standard ASCII set contains only the character positions from
+0 to 127 (i.e. anything that fits into an integer that is 7 bits wide). An
+example of this table can be found <a href="http://web.cs.mun.ca/%7Emichael/c/ascii-table.html">here</a>. Anything that has an ASCII code between 128 and 255 is in principle undefined.<br>
+<br>
+
+Now, several systems (including the old DOS) have defined those character
+positions anyway, but usually in totally different ways. Some well
+known extensions are:<br>
+<ul>
+<li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/cp437.gif">DOS</a>
+ character set, nowadays usually known as Code Page 437, but sometimes also
+named LatinUS, ECS (Extended Character Set) or PC-8; note that the table
+displayed in the link also contains the standard ASCII part</li><li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/cp1252.gif">ANSI</a> character set, also known as Code Page 1252, and usually the default on Windows</li><li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859-1.gif">ISO-8859-1</a> character set (also called Latin-1), which is an ISO standard for Western European languages, mostly used on various Unices</li><li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/adobe-stdenc.gif">Adobe Standard Encoding</a>, which is by default used in Postscript, unless overridden</li>
+</ul>
+
+And these are only examples of character sets used in West-European languages.
+ For Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, ... there are separate character
+sets in which one byte's meaning can even be influenced by what the previous
+byte was, i.e. these are multi-byte character sets. This is because
+even 256 characters (the maximum for 8 bits) is totally inadequate to represent all characters in
+such languages.<br>
+<br>
+
+So, summarizing, if a text file contains a byte that has a value 65, it is
+pretty safe to assume that this byte represents an "A", if we ignore the
+multi-byte character sets spoken of before. However, a value 233 cannot
+be interpreted without knowing in which character set the text file is written.
+ In Latin-1, it happens to be the character "é", but in another
+character set it can be something totally different (e.g. in the DOS character
+set it is the Greek letter theta).<br>
+<br>
+
+Vice versa, if you need to write a character "é" to a file, it depends
+on the character set you will use what the numerical value will be in the
+file: in Latin-1 it will be 233, but if you use the DOS character set it
+will be 130.<br>
+<hr width="100%" size="2">
+<h2><a name="Unicode"></a>Unicode</h2>
+
+Enter the Unicode standard...<br>
+<hr width="100%" size="2">
+<pre><font size="-1">$Id$<br>$Name$</font><br></pre>
+<br>
+</body></html>
\ No newline at end of file
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head>
- <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>The Gedcom parser library</title></head><body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff" link="#000099" vlink="#990099" alink="#000099">
+ <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>The Gedcom parser library internals</title></head><body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff" link="#000099" vlink="#990099" alink="#000099">
<div align="center">
-<h1>The Gedcom parser library</h1>
+<h1>The Gedcom parser library internals</h1>
<div align="left">The intention of this page is to provide some explanation
of the gedcom parser, to aid development on and with it. First,
<br>
This basic description ignores the problem of character encoding. The next section describes what this problem exactly is.<br>
<br>
- <h3><a name="Character_encoding"></a>Character encoding</h3>
- <h4><i>The character encoding problem</i><br>
- </h4>
-Developers are usually familiar with the ASCII character set. This
-is a character set that assigns a unique number to some characters, e.g.
-an "A" has ASCII code 65 (or 0x41 in hex), and an "a" has ASCII code 97 (or
-0x61 in hex). Some people may also have used ASCII codes for several
-drawing characters (such as a horizontal bar, a vertical bar, or a top-right
-corner) in the old DOS days, to be able to draw nice windows in text mode.<br>
- <br>
-However, these last characters are strictly spoken not part of the ASCII
-set. The standard ASCII set contains only the character positions from
-0 to 127 (i.e. anything that fits into an integer that is 7 bits wide). An
-example of this table can be found <a href="http://web.cs.mun.ca/%7Emichael/c/ascii-table.html">here</a>. Anything that has an ASCII code between 128 and 255 is in principle undefined.<br>
- <br>
-Now, several systems (including the old DOS) have defined those character
-positions anyway, but usually in totally different ways. Some well
-known extensions are:<br>
- <ul>
- <li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/cp437.gif">DOS</a>
- character set, nowadays usually known as Code Page 437, but sometimes also
-named LatinUS, ECS (Extended Character Set) or PC-8; note that the table
-displayed in the link also contains the standard ASCII part</li>
- <li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/cp1252.gif">ANSI</a> character set, also known as Code Page 1252, and usually the default on Windows</li>
- <li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859-1.gif">ISO-8859-1</a> character set (also called Latin-1), which is an ISO standard for Western European languages, mostly used on various Unices</li>
- <li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/adobe-stdenc.gif">Adobe Standard Encoding</a>, which is by default used in Postscript, unless overridden</li>
- </ul>
-And these are only examples of character sets used in West-European languages.
- For Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, ... there are separate character
-sets in which one byte's meaning can even be influenced by what the previous
-byte was, i.e. these are multi-byte character sets. This is because
-even 256 characters is totally inadequate to represent all characters in
-such languages.<br>
- <br>
-So, summarizing, if a text file contains a byte that has a value 65, it is
-pretty safe to assume that this byte represents an "A", if we ignore the
-multi-byte character sets spoken of before. However, a value 233 cannot
-be interpreted without knowing in which character set the text file is written.
- In Latin-1, it happens to be the character "é", but in another
-character set it can be something totally different (e.g. in the DOS character
-set it is the Greek letter theta).<br>
- <br>
-Vice versa, if you need to write a character "é" to a file, it depends
-on the character set you will use what the numerical value will be in the
-file: in Latin-1 it will be 233, but if you use the DOS character set it
-will be 130.<br>
- <br>
- <h4><i>Unicode</i></h4>
-Enter the Unicode standard...<br>
- <br>
+ <h3><a name="Character_encoding"></a>Character encoding</h3>Refer to <a href="encoding.html">this page</a> for some introduction on character encoding...<br>
+
+ <h4></h4><br>
TO BE COMPLETED<br>
projects / gedcom-parse.git / commitdiff