From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2006-06-21T02:50:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 6/20/06, gwtmp01@mac.com <gwtmp01@mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 20, 2006, at 8:09 AM, Michal Suchanek wrote:
> > If I read pieces of text from web pages they can be in different
> > encodings. I do not see any reason why such pieces of text could not
> > be automatically concatenated as long as they are all subset of
> > unicode.
>
> I'm not sure I understand what 'subset of unicode' means.
>
> Do you mean two different encodings of Unicode code points?
> As in 'UTF-8 and UTF-16 are subsets of Unicode'?
>
> That usage seems unusual to me.  Are you using 'subset' and 'encoding'
> as synonyms or am I missing subtle difference?
>
I mean that iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-2 encodings (as well as many
other) encode a subset of characters available in Unicode, and any of
its utf-* encodings. Thus any string that is encoded using such
encoding can be losslessly and automatically converted to an encoding
of full unicode such as utf-8, and operations on several such
converted strings make sense even if the strings were encoded using
different encodings before the conversion.

The automatic conversion would simplify things if you get strings in
different encodings from outside sources such as various web pages,
databases, etc.

Thanks

Michal