On Monday 2003.10.20 13:31:49 -0700, Shao, Yiying wrote:
> Thanks for your info.  
> 
> >>Just wondering if anybody knowss how unicode is on Linux?
> >>
> >Very good support.  Default charset for recent versions of some popular 
> distributions.
> 
> What are those popular distributions and which version?  
> 
> 
> >>On Red Hat Linux, if UTF-8 is not made as the default encoding for 
> >>Chnese/Japanese/Korean, what it is using for those double byte languages? 
> 
> >The old multi-byte character sets.
> 
> So, how should I implement my code?  Do I have to say if this is Japanese (for 
> example), convert the unicode (UTF-8) to multi-byte character?  That seems very 
> painful.
>  
No.  Forget about old multi-byte encodings.  Just set your locale to a UTF-8 locale 
and use UTF-8 
for all languages.  In my experience (on SuSE 7.3, 8.1, 8.2, and the 9.0 betas) all of 
the "important"
applications handle CJK languages perfectly well under a UTF-8 locale.  The 
"important" applications
for me are things like Open Office 1.1, Konsole, vim, MySQL, and Mozilla.  For CJK 
input, use SCIM
(http://ns.turbolinux.com.cn/~suzhe/scim/index.html).  For many other details about 
Unicode
on Linux, see my page at http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/index.html.

> >>Does later Red Had Linux makes the UTF-8 the default encoding for them?
> 
> AFAIK only if you manually set it to a UTF-8 locale, e.g. 
> LANG=zh-CN.UTF-8.  Notice, though, that some older software will not be 
> aware of this change, so many characters will not be displayed properly.
> 
> So, is this setting available from Red Hat 8.0 or later?  Also, you mean some old 
> version of Linux may not aware of this setting?
> 
> 
> Besides, do you happen to know ICU from IBM?  Does it take care of the unicode 
> problems with double byte language for Linux? 

Most likely.  But I think your life will be easier if you just use UTF-8 for all 
languages and forget about legacy
encodings.  I'm sure ICU must have very robust UTF-8 support.

> 
> Thanks,
> Yiying 

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