Hi Stefano,
Installing the MARC::Charset module can be a bit problematic for the
casual Perl user, due to the prerequisites. However if you need to do a
MARC-8 to UTF-8 conversion, that's probably the best tool available.
The issue with MARC-8 conversions is that MARC-8 is only really used for
encoding bibliographic records and with its use of combining diacritics
and escape sequences, it is more complex than the typical 8-bit
character set [1]. Most of the software development in the area of
library-centric character sets is done by ILS vendors, who typically
don't make their efforts available in the form of freely available Perl
modules.
You didn't say mention why you were wanting to do a character set
conversion. If you just need a "quick and dirty" conversion for
ephemeral display of bibliographic information on a web page, you might
look at alternatives such as converting from MARC-8 to Latin-1 (ISO
8859-1). That's a potentially lossy conversion, however if most of your
records are Italian, the Latin-1 repertoire should suffice. There are
some available Perl routines that should handle that conversion [2].
-- Michael
[1] Coded Character Sets: A Technical Primer for Librarians
http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/charsets/
[2] MARC to Latin: a charset conversion routine in Perl
http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/charset/
# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
# 817-272-5326 office
# 817-688-1926 cell
# [EMAIL PROTECTED]
# http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: bargioni [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005 4:43 AM
> To: perl4lib@perl.org
> Subject: MARC-8 to UTF-8 conversion
>
> Hi, I'm trying to convert MARC-8 records to UTF-8 on the fly.
> March::Charset doesn't work for me.
> Any suggestion? Also a command line way can be good for my purposes.
> TIA. Stefano
> --
> Dott. Stefano Bargioni
> Pontificia Universita' della Santa Croce - Roma
> Vicedirettore della Biblioteca
>
>
