My colleagues on the list have given you extremely cryptic answers, albeit accurate -- and probably complete.
But unicode is puzzling when you first meet it, especially utf-8, a standard for embedding "unicode" characters like 'ç' as multi-byte substrings in (what is otherwise) ascii text. So puzzling, in fact, that I wrote myself these notes: http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/UnicodeGettingStarted to remind myself about it when I came to deal with it all over again. And maybe to help another beginner. They'll have you believe that j602 is unicode-savvy, making ascii vs unicode considerations invisible to the coder. Just like numbers. :-) And that's the way it feels to me these days. But that wasn't how it felt when I started out. You can indeed arrange for (a.) to handle 'ç' and its sisters in a 1-byte fashion, in the way you ask. (128{a.) to (255{a.) are unused, and can be used as placeholders for extended Latin characters. Allocate them how you like, and convert them to the glyph you wish to see only when required for output. This permits you to code in a way you're familiar with. It is the way I started out, when I had a similar coding task. But soon you will find it better to standardize on wchar ("wide-characters", ie 2-byte ones) for strings containing French text. I use: wide=: 2 u: 7 u: ] to force a string into wchars, even if it contains only alphanumeric. This may be overkill, but one can grow heartily sick of looking up the left argument to (u:). And datatype_z_ will tell you what form your string is currently being held in, viz 'literal' (which includes utf-8) or 'unicode'. All parts of j602 have been enhanced to accommodate both utf-8 and wchars, including button captions in wd. But a beginner can be tricked into thinking that this is not the case, as when buttons show black squares at runtime. The answer is: specify another font, ie one which actually has glyphs for the black squares. Courier New is a safe choice because it has glyphs for most (Western) code points, including APL -- but oh-so-ugly! Ian Clark On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Eric Morlet <[email protected]> wrote: > While writing a J application that will handle people names I would like to > know > if there is a way for me to have a character set (a.) that would include the > french accented characters: > > à â ê é è ê ë î ï ô ö ù ç > > While scanning character arrays I have: > > a. i. 'ç' > 195 167 > > 'x' = 'x' NB. OK > 1 > > but: > > 'ç' = 'ç' NB. !!! > 1 1 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
