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

[M.-A. Lemburg]

"Martin v. Loewis" wrote:
> 
> > 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.

Sure would be nice... the only problem I see is that the 
different codecs for the Asian scripts will most probably
behave differently, e.g. there are many issues with private
code point areas in Unicode and the various Asian encodings.

It would still be nice to have different codec packages around
though -- even if they all implement the same converters, e.g.
AsianCharmapCodecs, NativeWin32Codecs, NativeCLibCodecs, etc.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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