On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Rick Cameron wrote:
> 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 Hmmm ... Suppose I'm searching for some relatively obscure traditional character that occurs mostly in Wen Yen (u+6587 u+8A00 : Classical Chinese) and has a very specific meaning in Classical Chinese. This character gets "folded" or "mapped" to a fairly common character in modern bai hua (u+767D u+8BDD) Chinese, and then the search proceeds. The result set contains hundreds or thousands of irrelevant results related to the modern meaning, and I still have to sift through them looking for the needles in the haystack. I'll try to provide a concrete example once I think of one ... it's been a long time since I studied Classical Chinese. > > 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 >
