display charset

Andrew Tridgell tridge at valinux.com
Wed Aug 15 13:36:57 GMT 2001


> >which is 5 characters.
> 
> No, in Japanese all FULL-WIDTH characters included most characters
> except ASCII consume 2 columns.

yikes! I didn't know that. That makes a lot more sense now.

This presents a real problem though, because using iconv as the basis
for our character set handling doesn't give us enough information. We
need to know how many columns each character consumes.

so, if we want to get this right then we'll need 3 functions per
character set:

1) a function to convert to ucs2
2) a function to convert from ucs2
3) a function telling us what the display width (in columns) is

Because I thought that we only needed (1) and (2) I thought iconv was
sufficient. Now that we need (3) its much trickier. 

Do you know if other languages do this? (ie. number of characters !=
number of columns)





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