Re: advantages and disadvantages of local/lang en_CA.UTF-8?
On 6/6/07, Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 01:24:32PM +0800, Wei Chen wrote:
> Things could be easy for English speaking people, since UTF-8 is fully
> compatible with ASCII. However, for people that do not speak English,
> for example CJK people, using UTF-8 may mean not compatible with others
> that use legacy character encodings.
Wei (or is it Chen?),
Normally it should be Wei ;-)
Could you give me an example? If I write a text file on my en_CA.UTF-8
system and send it to you, are you saying that since you're not using
en_CA.UTF-8 that you can't read it since you are using CJK? If I were
back to using 'C', could you?
Actually I can read your file regardless what your locale setting and my
locale setting are (unless one of them is something like utf-16, which is
not ASCII compatible; I am not sure whether this kind of locales exist),
as long as the file is solely in English.
Things only become difficult when characters in some other languages
are involved, e.g. Chinese.
If you write to me in Chinese using GB18030, and my LC_CTYPE
is set to some utf-8, there will be problems, and vice versa. The problem
is that unicode is still not so widely used nowadays.
So for native English people like you, utf-8 (and other ASCII compatible
locales) can be used safely with no problem. You can be sure that people
can read you files if they are in English, regardless locale settings.
HTH
--
Cheers,
Wei
http://www.acplex.com/people/wchen/
Reply to: