At the time of creation, characters and bytes were 1-to-1 because MARC
used only ASCII. So there was no distinction at the outset. Some
positions are still limited to ascii characters (Leader, fixed fields,
subfield codes, etc.).
kc
On 4/18/12 7:20 AM, Huwig,Steve wrote:
I could be mistaken (never having had the pleasure of reading it), but
isn't ISO-2709 specified as a fixed number of characters, and any
conflation of characters and 8-bit bytes is on the part of users and
implementations?
I think ISO 2709 might not know from bytes, only characters.
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of
Doran, Michael D
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:05 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] more on MARC char encoding: Now we're about
ISO_2709 and MARC21
Hi Tod,
I'm not understanding how UTF-8 would be considered 8-bit character
data (other than the ASCII-range of the Unicode repertoire, natch). I
don't think ISO 2709 knows from characters, only bytes.
-- Michael
# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
# 817-272-5326 office
# 817-688-1926 mobile
# [email protected]
# http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of
Tod Olson
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 5:04 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] more on MARC char encoding: Now we're about
ISO_2709 and MARC21
It has to mean UTF-8. ISO 2709 is very byte-oriented, from the
directory
structure to the byte-offsets in the fixed fields. The values in
these
places all assume 8-bit character data, it's completely baked in to
the
file format.
-Tod
On Apr 17, 2012, at 6:55 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
Okay, forget XML for a moment, let's just look at marc 'binary'.
First, for Anglophone-centric MARC21.
The LC docs don't actually say quite what I thought about leader
byte
09, used to advertise encoding:
a - UCS/Unicode
Character coding in the record makes use of characters from the
Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) (ISO 10646), or Unicode(tm), an
industry
subset.
That doesn't say UTF-8. It says UCS or "Unicode". What does that
actually mean? Does it mean UTF-8, or does it mean UTF-16 (closer
to
what used to be called "UCS" I think?). Whatever it actually means,
do
people violate it in the wild?
Now we get to non-Anglophone centric marc. I think all of which is
ISO_2709? A standard which of course is not open access, so I can't
get
it to see what it says.
But leader 09 being used for encoding -- is that Marc21 specific,
or is
it true of any ISO-2709? Marc8 and "unicode" being the only valid
encodings can't be true of any ISO-2709, right?
Is there a generic ISO-2709 way to deal with this, or not so much?
--
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
