I found that the adjacent letters of the Japanese tilde are small if they are Chinese characters, and large if they are kana.
I would like to ask the seniors, is this a feature of the language, or a bug of vscode? See below
～つ
～着
～羽
～番
～足
～度
～キロ（メートル）
The search function, can confirm, is the same character, so I'm confused.
Moreover, my file encoding is UTF-8, there should be no strange character set errors.
Related
This may sound like a stupid question. I typed some Chinese characters into an empty text file in VS code text editor (default utf8). Then I saved the file in an encoding for Japanese: shift JIS, which apparently doesn't cover all the characters I have typed in.
However, before I close the file, all Chinese characters are displayed properly in VS code. Now after I closed the file and reopened it using shift JIS encoding, several characters are displayed as a question mark ?. I guess these are the Chinese characters not covered by the Japanese encoding?
What happened in the process? Is there anyway I can 'get back' the Chinese characters that are now shown in ?? I don't really understand how encoding works in this scenario...
Not all encodings cover all characters. (Unicode encodings, in principle, do, but even they don't have quite everything yet.) If you save some text in an encoding which does not include all characters in that text, something has to give.
Options:
you get an error message,
nothing saves at all,
the characters which cannot be included are silently dropped,
the characters which cannot be included are converted to some other character (such as the question mark).
Once that conversion is done, the data is lost, and cannot be recovered. Why not use UTF-8 or another Unicode encoding? (GB 18030 might be the best for large amounts of Chinese text.)
🔖
I am not sure whether everyone can see the above character, but I can see it. I got it when I input "booknote" in Chinese on my iPhone. To my surprise, this character seems "platform-insensative", it can be seen on my phones, chrome on laptop, and even in MacOS terminal.
Is it an ASCII character? I've never seen colorful characters like this before. Since when these have been around? And where I can get a list of similar characters?
Here: http://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/index.html
You put the character on an HTML page. All characters on an HTML page are from the Unicode character set. Characters that are not in the Unicode character set either soon will be or are too specialized to be of general use.
The Unicode Consortium occasionally publishes a new version of the character set. Since you ask about the kind of character, the common partitions of the character set are blocks, categories, and—stretching a bit—which version the character was added in. Some characters are in a script (for a language writing system), some are not. You see the block and category of 🔖 at http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f516/index.htm.
The Unicode character set is published in text files called the Unicode Character Database (UCD), as well as many supplementary documents and webpages. The data includes important information about usage and relationships. For example, for applicable characters, which character is considered the uppercase form of another in a particular language.
To see any character, you have to use a font that presents it. This can be a problem for some characters. There is probably no one font that presents every Unicode character as it was meant to be.
You mentioned ASCII. Although it used every day in HTTP headers and other specialized and historical applications, ASCII is such a limited character set that it hasn't generally been used in decades.
I am a developer who is working with Chinese characters. I am trying to convert part of my project into English. I am currently rewriting the project's internationalization module.
I am unfamiliar with the standards for English, so I don't know if non-ascii is used widely?
If it is: Tell me some characters they use frequently.
Standard English spelling uses en dash (–), curly quotation marks (“, ”, ‘, ’); American English also uses em dash (—). Depending on conventions and preferences, several non-Ascii letters may be used, too, especially in words of French or Latin origin, such as é, ë, ç, and æ. Moreover, even in nonspecialized texts, various special character such as superscript two (²), micro sign (µ), and degree sign (°) may be seen.
Our MFC application uses Multi Byte Character Set (MBCS). OS is Windows 7.
We could type in Chinese Simplified characters by virtual keyboard, but copy pasting Chinese characters from Google Translate to an edit box in the application shows junk characters "????"
Is this a known issue with MBCS applications? Is there a workaround?
When copying and pasting into a multi-byte app the Unicode characters will be converted into the local code page. If they can't be converted you'll get ?. You really should be compiling and distributing your app in Unicode otherwise you'll be fighting these sorts of issues all the time.
If you can't re-compile in Unicode try catching the 'Paste' action and handle the clipboard yourself. Use GetClipboardData and read the value for CF_UNICODETEXT, which will be the valid text. You'll then need to do your own conversion to the correct multi-byte format.
I copied large amount of text from another system to my PC. When I viewed the text in my PC, it looked weird. So I copied all the fonts from the other PC and installed them in mine too. Now the text looks okay, but actually it seems that is not in Unicode. For example, if I copy the text and paste in another UTF-8 supported editor such as Notepad++, I get English characters ("bgah;") only like shown below.
How to convert this whole text into unicode text, like the one below. So I can copy the text and paste anywhere else.
பெயர்
The above text was manually obtained using http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/Tamil
I need this conversion to be done, so I can copy them into database tables.
'Ja-01' is a font with a custom 'visual encoding'.
That is to say, the sequence of characters really is "bgah;" and it only looks like Tamil to you because the font's shapes for the Latin characters bg look like பெ.
This is always to be avoided, because by storing the content as "bgah;" you lose the ability to search and process it as real Tamil, but this approach was common in the pre-Unicode days especially for less-widespread scripts without mature encoding standards. This application probably predates widespread use of TSCII.
Because it is a custom encoding not shared by any other font, it is very unlikely you will be able to find a tool to convert content in this encoding to proper Unicode characters. It does not appear to be any standard character ordering, so you will have to look at the font (eg in charmap.exe) and note down every character, find the matching character in Unicode and map between them.
For example here's a trivial Python script to replace characters in a file:
mapping= {
u'a': u'\u0BAF', # Tamil letter Ya
u'b': u'\u0BAA', # Tamil letter Pa
u'g': u'\u0BC6', # Tamil vowel sign E (combining)
u'h': u'\u0BB0', # Tamil letter Ra
u';': u'\u0BCD', # Tamil sign virama (combining)
# fill in the rest of the mapping information here!
}
with open('ja01data.txt', 'rb') as fp:
data= fp.read().decode('utf-8')
for char in mapping:
data= data.replace(char, mapping[char])
with open('utf8data.txt', 'wb') as fp:
fp.write(data.encode('utf-8'))
The font you found is getting you into trouble. The actual cell text is "bgah;", it gets rendered to பெயர் because you found a font that can work with 8-bit non-Unicode characters. So reading it or pasting it into Notepad++ is going to produce "bgah;" since that's the real text. It can only ever be rendered properly again by forcing the program that displays the string to use that same font.
Ditch the font and enter Unicode so it looks like this:
"bgah" looks like a Baamini based system, which is pre-unicode. It was popular in Canada (and the SL Tamil diaspora in general) in the 90s.
As the others mentioned, it looks like a custom visual encoding that mimics the performance of a foreign script while maintaining ASCII encoding.
Google "Baamini to unicode convertor". The University of Colombo seems to have put one up: http://www.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/ltrl/services/feconverter/?maps=t_b-u.xml
Let me know if this works. If not, I can ask around and get something for you.
You could first check whether the encoding is TSCII, as this sounds most probable. It is an 8-bit encoding, and the fonts you copied are probably based on that encoding. Check out whether the TSCII to UTF-8 converter at SourceForge is suitable. The project there is called “Any Tamil Encoding to Unicode” but they say that only TSCII is supported for now.