The Win32 API includes a function that can do this folding, on Windows NT/2000/XP: LCMapString, with the option LCMAP_SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE or LCMAP_TRADITIONAL_CHINESE.
I know little about Chinese, but I have the impression that it is much more common for several traditional characters to correspond to one simplified character than vice versa. If that's true, it seems to me that it would make most sense to fold to simplified. - rick -----Original Message----- From: Marco Cimarosti [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, 13 February 2003 11:13 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: traditional vs simplified chinese Paul wrote: > To: Edward H Trager > > Marco Cimarosti has questioned, why do you need to classify > > text as being simplified or traditional? > > if i understand their needs correctly, its to implement a > search system with search phrases of either "type" of > chinese--content would be in both types. Still, I don't see what's the purpose of "classifying" the user input. What they really need is rather a special collation algorithm that *ignores* the difference between corresponding traditional and simplified characters for the purpose of searching. This is somewhat analogous to making a "caseless" search. The easiest way to do it is "folding" both the user's query and the content being sought to the same form (either traditional or simplified, it doesn't matter). It may also help to "fold" also other kinds of variants beside simplified and traditional. This "folding" is much easy that implementing a full-fledged simplified<->traditional conversion (which needs to be context sensitive and dictionary-driven), because the result is just in a temporary buffer used for comparison, and no one is going to see it. _ Marco
