there is 7707 languages listed in this link http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/download.asp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639:a.
And also Unicode support the writing system of the languages, but i want to know mapping beetween the languages and unicode range.
Unicode range is listed in this link http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/bmp/
Example one of unicode range : "start"=> "0x0900", "end"=> "0x097F", "block_name"=> "Devanagari" (what language use this range of unicode ?)
there is any documentation ? I need full languages mapping that are supported in unicode range.
You can take a look at ICU4C locale (http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/uloc_8h.html)
You can get all the locales (with uloc_getAvailable), then for each locale call uloc_addLikelySubtags, and then uloc_getScript on the result.
This is going to give you the most likely script used by a language. But there are languages that use more than one script. Some of them are captured by ICU, but some are not.
Related
I need to create packages that contain Unicode characters used only by a specified language. A key requirement for these packages is to make them as small as possible (thus why each package only contains the characters used for its language).
The problem is I can't find a single resource online that specifies the ranges ONLY for a certain language, such as ranges X1-X2, Y3-Y8, etc for Simplified Chinese. Instead everywhere tells me to use CJK (U+4E00 - U+9FFF). I'd like to know which parts of CJK are used for each of the below languages.
I understand that many characters in Asian languages are considered obsolete/unused. Thus they should be excluded from the ranges. The ranges should only include characters used to communicate. I hope that's clear haha..
That being said, the languages I'm try to make these packages for are:
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese
Korean
Japanese
Does anyone know the exclusive ranges for these languages or how to find them out?
I have a dataset which mixes use of unicode characters \u0421, 'С' and \u0043, 'C'. Is there some sort of unicode comparison which considers those two characters the same? So far I've tried several ICU collations, including the Russian one.
There is no Unicode comparison that treats characters as the same on the basis of visual identity of glyphs. However, Unicode Technical Standard #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms, deals with “confusables” – characters that may be confused with each other due to visual identity or similarity. It includes a data file of confusables as well as “intentionally confusable” pairs, i.e. “characters whose glyphs in any particular typeface would probably be designed to be identical in shape when using a harmonized typeface design”, which mainly consists of pairs of Latin and Cyrillic or Greek letters, like C and С. You would probably need to code your own use of this data, as ICU does not seem to have anything related to the confusable concept.
when you take a look at http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/UnicodeData.txt, you will see that some code positions are annotated for codepoints that are similar in use; however, i'm not aware of any extensive list that covers visual similarities across scripts. you might want to search for URL spoofing using intentional misspellings, which was discussed when they came up with punycode. other than that, your best bet might be to search the data for characters outside the expected using regular expressions, and compile a series of ad-hoc text fixers like text = text.replace /с/, 'c'.
i want to use korean translations under in my - quite large - wxwidgets application. The application uses the wxwidgets translation framework, which is based on gettext.
I have working translations for french, german and russian. I want to go unicode anyway, but my first question is:
does my application need unicode support to display korean and japanese languages?
If so, - just for interest - why does russian work without, since they have a cyrillic letterset?
I have thousands of string literals. Do i have to prepend each and every one of them with 'L' ? ( wxString foo("foo") --> wxString foo(L"foo") )
if so, did someone build a regex or sed or perl script to do this in ca. 500 .cpp files ? ( pleeze! =) )
Will this change in wxWidgets 3.0?
Unicode question general: i use these string literals in many descriptive and many technical ways .. as displayed text as well as parts of GLSL shaders as well as XML. These APIs have char* / const char* as function arguments, so my internal wxString representation should not matter in these areas. Theory and practice: is this true? Some experiences to share, anyone?
I do some text processing ( comparing, string finding etc ) - are there any logical differences in unicode vs. ansi?
Is there any remarkeable performance impact in using Unicode?
Thank you!
Wendy
Addressing some of your questions…
does my application need unicode support to display korean and japanese languages?
If so, - just for interest - why does russian work without, since they have a cyrillic letterset?
Russian fits in a single-byte charset, just like western European languages (though it is a different charset). Korean and Japanese (and Chinese) don't. There are many workarounds for this, but the most elegant I know of to date is to use Unicode so that you don't need to rebuild your application for each locale; just change its message catalog.
Unicode question general: i use these string literals in many descriptive and many technical ways .. as displayed text as well as parts of GLSL shaders as well as XML. These APIs have char* / const char* as function arguments, so my internal wxString representation should not matter in these areas. Theory and practice: is this true? Some experiences to share, anyone?
Only strings that are going to be shown to (non-technical) users need to be localized, so they're the only ones that have to be in Unicode. The most common approach is to use UTF-8 (which is a particular way of encoding Unicode) as that means that ASCII strings – the most common type passed around inside programs – are exactly the same, which simplifies things a lot. The down-side is that you no longer have cheap indexing into the string as not all characters are the same number of bytes long. That can be anything from a non-issue to a right royal hindering PITA, depending on what the program is doing.
I do some text processing ( comparing, string finding etc ) - are there any logical differences in unicode vs. ansi?
Comparisons work fine, as does simple string finding. Other operations (e.g., getting the 20th character of a string, or working out how many characters into a string you've found a substring) are nasty because you've not got constant character widths. The nastiness can be mitigated by using wide characters, but they're less nice to use for external data (they introduce potential problems with endianness unless you go into working with byte-order marks, and that's another matter right there).
Is there any remarkeable performance impact in using Unicode?
Depends on exactly what you do. With UTF-8, if you're mostly dealing with ASCII text in reality then you get very little in the way of performance problems for most operations. With wide characters, you take more memory for every character, which naturally has performance implications (but which might acceptable because it does mean you've got constant-time indexing).
There's a korean .po file on http://www.wxwidgets.org/about/i18n.php for wxWidget's own strings. If your application displays wxWidget's own strings correctly when using that file, then it does not need Unicode support to display Korean and Japanese languages.
ISO-8859-5 is an 8 bit character set with Cyrillic letters.
Only if 1. does not yield the correct result. But if you want to translate the string, you should have used _().
I don't know.
wxWidgets 3.0 will not have separate Unicode- and ANSI-builds. 2.9.1 doesn't have, either.
It depends on how you use the arguments. C- and C++-functions usually operate on the representation of strings and are unaware of any particular character encoding. Particularly what you perceive to be a character and what the program considers a character might be different things.
See 6.
I do not know, but many toolkits use UTF-16 or UTF-32 instead of UTF-8 because these schemes are simpler. It's a size-speed tradeoff.
1.does my application need unicode support to display korean and japanese
languages?
Thanks to Oswald, i found out that you can have a korean translation without using unicode in your wxwidgets application. Change ( under windows, at least ) settings for non-unicode aware programs. But i still have to check out if this is enough for a whole application.
3.I have thousands of string literals. Do i have to prepend each
and every one of them with 'L' ? (
wxString foo("foo") --> wxString
foo(L"foo") )
If you have to use unicode with wxwidgets prior to 3.0, you have to. But do not use 'L' under wxwidgets, use wxT("foo")
4.if so, did someone build a regex or sed or perl script to do this in ca. 500 .cpp files ?
I did, at least a search and replace under Visual Studio:
Search: {"([^"]*)"}
Replace: wxT(\1)
But be careful! Will replace all string literals, #include "file.h" with #include wxT("file.h")
Will this change in wxWidgets 3.0?
Yes. See answer/quote above.
Based on the link below, I'm confused as to whether the Lua programming language supports Unicode.
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUnicode
It appears it does but has limitations. I simply don't understand, are the limitation anything big/key or not a big deal?
You can certainly store unicode strings in lua, as utf8. You can use these as you would any string.
However Lua doesn't provide any default support for higher-level "unicode aware" operations on such strings—e.g., counting string length in characters, converting lower-to-upper-case, etc. Whether this lack is meaningful for you really depends on what you intend to do with these strings.
Possible approaches, depending on your use:
If you just want to input/output/store strings, and generally use them as "whole units" (for table indexing etc), you may not need any special handling at all. In this case, you just treat these strings as binary blobs.
Due to utf8's clever design, some types of string manipulation can be done on strings containing utf8 and will yield the correct result without taking any special care.
For instance, you can append strings, split them apart before/after ascii characters, etc. As an example, if you have a string "開発.txt" and you search for "." in that string using string.find (string_var, "."), and then split it using the normal string.sub function into "開発" and ".txt", those result strings will be correct utf8 strings even though you're not using any kind of "unicode-aware" algorithm.
Similarly, you can do case-conversions on only the ASCII characters in strings (those with the high bit zero), and treat the rest of the strings as binary without screwing them up.
Some utf8-aware operations are so simple that it's easy to just write one's own functions to do them.
For instance, to calculate the length in unicode-characters of a string, just count the number of characters with the high bit zero (ASCII characters), and the number of characters with the top two bits 11 ("leading bytes" for non-ASCII characters); the length is the sum of those two.
For more complex operations—e.g., case-conversion on non-ASCII characters, etc.—you'll probably have to use a Lua unicode library, such as those on the (previously mentioned) Lua-users Unicode page
Lua does not have any support for unicode (other than accepting any byte value in strings). The library slnunicode has a lot of unicode string functions, however. For example unicode.utf8.len.
(note: this answer is completely stolen from grom's comment on another question - I just think it deserves its own answer)
If you want a short answer, it is 'yes and no' as put on the linked site.
Lua supports Unicode in the way that specifying, storing and querying arbitrary byte values in strings is supported, so you can store any kind of Unicode-encoding encoded string in a Lua string.
What is not supported is iteration by unicode character, there is no standard function for string length in unicode characters etc. So the higher-level kind of Unicode support (like what is available in Python with length, lower -> upper case conversion, encoding in arbitrary coding etc) is not available.
Lua 5.3 was released now. It comes with a basic UTF-8 library.
You can use the utf8 library to do things about UTF-8 encoding, like getting the length of a UTF-8 string (not number of bytes as string.len), matching each characters (not bytes), etc.
It doesn't provide native support other than encoding, like is this character a Chinese character?
It supports it in the sense that you can use Unicode in Lua strings. It depends specifically on what you're planning to do, but most of the limitations can be fairly easily worked around by extending Lua with your own functions.
These days, more languages are using unicode, which is a good thing. But it also presents a danger. In the past there where troubles distinguising between 1 and l and 0 and O. But now we have a complete new range of similar characters.
For example:
ì, î, ï, ı, ι, ί, ׀ ,أ ,آ, ỉ, ﺃ
With these, it is not that difficult to create some very hard to find bugs.
At my work, we have decided to stay with the ANSI characters for identifiers. Is there anybody out there using unicode identifiers and what are the experiences?
Besides the similar character bugs you mention and the technical issues that might arise when using different editors (w/BOM, wo/BOM, different encodings in the same file by copy pasting which is only a problem when there are actually characters that cannot be encoded in ASCII and so on), I find that it's not worth using Unicode characters in identifiers. English has become the lingua franca of development and you should stick to it while writing code.
This I find particularly true for code that may be seen anywhere in the world by any developer (open source, or code that is sold along with the product).
My experience with using unicode in C# source files was disastrous, even though it was Japanese (so there was nothing to confuse with an "i"). Source Safe doesn't like unicode, and when you find yourself manually fixing corrupted source files in Word you know something isn't right.
I think your ANSI-only policy is excellent. I can't really see any reason why that would not be viable (as long as most of your developers are English, and even if they're not the world is used to the ANSI character set).
I think it is not a good idea to use the entire ANSI character set for identifiers. No matter which ANSI code page you're working in, your ANSI code page includes characters that some other ANSI code pages don't include. So I recommend sticking to ASCII, no character codes higher than 127.
In experiments I have used a wider range of ANSI characters than just ASCII, even in identifiers. Some compilers accepted it. Some IDEs needed options to be set for fonts that could display the characters. But I don't recommend it for practical use.
Now on to the difference between ANSI code pages and Unicode.
In experiments I have stored source files in Unicode and used Unicode characters in identifiers. Some compilers accepted it. But I still don't recommend it for practical use.
Sometimes I have stored source files in Unicode and used escape sequences in some strings to represent Unicode character values. This is an important practice and I recommend it highly. I especially had to do this when other programmers used ANSI characters in their strings, and their ANSI code pages were different from other ANSI code pages, so the strings were corrupted and caused compilation errors or defective results. The way to solve this is to use Unicode escape sequences.
I would also recommend using ascii for identifiers. Comments can stay in a non-english language if the editor/ide/compiler etc. are all locale aware and set up to use the same encoding.
Additionally, some case insensitive languages change the identifiers to lowercase before using, and that causes problems if active system locale is Turkish or Azerbaijani . see here for more info about Turkish locale problem. I know that PHP does this, and it has a long standing bug.
This problem is also present in any software that compares strings using Turkish locales, not only the language implementations themselves, just to point out. It causes many headaches
It depends on the language you're using. In Python, for example, is easierfor me to stick to unicode, as my aplications needs to work in several languages. So when I get a file from someone (something) that I don't know, I assume Latin-1 and translate to Unicode.
Works for me, as I'm in latin-america.
Actually, once everithing is ironed out, the whole thing becomes a smooth ride.
Of course, this depends on the language of choice.
I haven't ever used unicode for identifier names. But what comes to my mind is that Python allows unicode identifiers in version 3: PEP 3131.
Another language that makes extensive use of unicode is Fortress.
Even if you decide not to use unicode the problem resurfaces when you use a library that does. So you have to live with it to a certain extend.