Re: using iconv for conversion from/to Unicode

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bruno Haible wrote on 2000-03-14 13:51 UTC:
> "UCS-2-INTERNAL" would not be hard to implement: This is just a #ifdef
> choice between "UNICODEBIG" and "UNICODELITTLE", both already implemented
> in glibc.

Ulrich, Bruno,

Instead of inventing your own names for encodings, please use the exact
official names defined in Unicode Technical Report #17 and
ISO 10646-1:2000. This means making the following changes:

  "UNICODEBIG"     ->  "UCS-2BE"
  "UNICODELITTLE"  ->  "UCS-2LE"
  "UCS-2-INTERNAL" ->  "UCS-2"

If the implementation can handle surrogates, then better use "UTF-16BE",
"UTF-16LE", "UTF-16" instead.

Using the official encoding names will make it *much* more likely that
they can be used compatibly across platforms in the future.

References:

  Unicode Technical Report #17: Character Encoding Model, 1999-11-23,
  http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr17/

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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