realbasic-nug
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Shell Char Problem

To: REALbasic Network Users Group <realbasic-nug at lists dot realsoftware dot com>
Subject: Re: Shell Char Problem
From: "Joseph J. Strout" <joe at realsoftware dot com>
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2002 11:20:02 -0700
At 3:06 PM -0300 5/28/02, Leonardo Lima de Vasconcellos wrote:

Thanks, Joe! It works!!! :-)
Just for understanding purposes what is UTF-8 an MacRoman?

They're two different extensions of ASCII. ASCII is a mapping for 127 characters (such as "A") into numbers (65, in this example). But 127 is not enough characters for most languages in the world; it does not, for example, have any room for accented characters. So we need to use some extension of ASCII, or some entirely different way of representing characters as numbers in a computer. These are known as text encodings.

The MacRoman encoding is a 1-byte format that is the same as ASCII for values 1-127, but uses 128-255 to represent various accented characters and other handy symbols. UTF-8 is a different encoding, one that can represent "Unicode" -- a fairly new international standard capable, in principle at least, of representing any writing system on the planet. UTF-8 is also the same as ASCII for values 1-127, but other characters are represented by more than one byte.

UTF-8 is a really cool encoding, and I encourage you to learn more about it as the opportunities arise.

Cheers,
- Joe

--
,------------------------------------------------------------------.
|    Joseph J. Strout           REAL Software, Inc.                |
|    joe at realsoftware dot com       http://www.realsoftware.com        |
`------------------------------------------------------------------'


<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>