Posted by J.O. Aho on 04/08/07 06:55

Simply Confusing! wrote:

> i've done some web-pages in chinese. i pretty much ALWAYS work in unicode
> sequences, meaning, I convert the word doc's with chinese char's into html,
> then transplant the UNICODE SEQUENCES (ie, characters represented with stuff
> like this: 樣的東 ... etc ) into my templates.
>
> so i recently found a chinese language site and checked out the source code.
> it was puzzling because the charset was utf-8 and the source was actually in
> original chinese characters, not unicode.
>
> i'm quite puzzled now. my chinese pages are displaying fine with unicode
> under iso-8859-1, but I'm not sure what the "definitive" way is to display
> non-latin character sequences. is there one?

iso-8869-1 does only support a-zA-Z and some national characters used mainly
in western and northern Europe and do not support any form of Chinese
characters. It supports 256 "characters", which hardly would be enough for any
form of Chinese alone.

Character setups like big5 and gb2312 uses dual bytes to represent characters,
usually combinations of characters above the 128 first ones. If you want to
use these character setups, you should save the text in that format and not
convert it to HTML entities, as you do.

UTF-8 is a new character setup where you can use all languages in the same
time, it works in the same way as big5 does, where multiple bytes represents
characters, this way you get around the 256 character limitation of a singe
byte character setup. UTF-8 is an Unicode character setup.


--

//Aho

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