> Neil Jennings writes:
> |
> | The abc 2.0 draft has the following
> |
> | %%abc-charset iso-8859-1 (or other iso code)
>
> Well, yes, but that doesn't seem to have a well-defined scope. Does
> it apply to the whole file? If I have a text that's mixed Russian and
> Yiddish (not a hypothetic case), how do I indicate which parts are in
> which character set?
Unicode can encode anything, so if there is any character that can't be
expressed in ASCII, the whole file could be Unicode. Then the switching
isn't a problem.
Perhaps start the file with one of three things:
1) nothing - the file is ASCII
2) the string "ASCII", in the ASCII character set - the file is ASCII
3) the string "UNICODE", in the Unicode character set - the file is Unicode.
These tags can be interspersed, too, so anywhere that a X: tag is legal, so
that one could concatenate files of different types and it would switch on
the fly.
Files of type one couldn't be concatenated to a Unicode file, though, but
one could concatenate another file first that only contained the string
"ASCII".
> Also, there's a potentially very serious gotcha with this sort of
> charset indicator: What if I copy the file to another machine
> (perhaps via a browser, or maybe with a file-copy program), and it
> decides to rewrite the file to a native charset on the new machine.
> It will, of course, translate the above %% line to the new charset,
> but it will still claim that the text is iso-8859-1, and that's now
> wrong.
I've never heard of an OS doing that. They don't automatically translate
between \r\n and \r and \n.
Paul Rosen
--- Life is a musical, every once in a while
the plot stops and you start singing and dancing ---
http://home.earthlink.net/~paulerosen/brbb/
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