Re: Language Character Sets

On 2001-01-23 21:56, Howard J. Rogers <howardjr_at_www.com> wrote:
>Use unicode. Makes these sorts of worries utterly obsolete, at the
>slight cost of making all your French (and other Latin-based) data
>twice as long as it otherwise would be.

If by "Unicode" you mean UTF8, that's not true. UTF8 is a variable length encoding - a character can take up 1, 2, or 3 bytes. For French (and other European languages which use the latin alphabet with only a few accents here and there) the average number of bytes per character would be only a little over 1. For other letter-alphabets - like cyrillic or arabic - it should be a little under 2, and for ideographic alphabets about 3.

        hp

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