[I18n-sig] Re: [XML-SIG] Character encodings and expat

[Martin v. Loewis]

> That's only Shift-JIS and EUC-JP, though.  Is there any concerted
> effort afoot to make a more complete set?  At the very least, 
> ISO 2022-JP, Big5, VISCII, GB-2312 and EUC-KR should be implemented.

I'd hope that somebody exposes the operating system's converters to
Python. For example, on Linux and Solaris, the iconv library offers a
wide variety of codecs (at least in its gconv form), which are also
highly performant. On W2k, a huge set of converters is available,
which just waits being exposed to Python.

I'm always concerned by the fact that every package seems to come with
its own set of conversion tables, instead on relying on other people
to do a good job (and report bugs if they don't). Tcl has such tables,
Java does, X11 has some, ICU has more - I really can't see the reason
to reimplement them all again in Python.

> | More about this on the i18n-sig mailing list.
> 
> Well, if only a single response is required I would prefer to get that
> here. 

This is free software. You never get away with a single response only
:-)

Regards,
Martin