Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 8 Jan 2007 02:59:58 +0100 | From | Adrian Bunk <> | Subject | Re: OT: character encodings |
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On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 02:32:42AM +0100, Tilman Schmidt wrote: > Am 08.01.2007 01:38 schrieb Willy Tarreau: >... > > And I'm not even > > discussing the stupidity which requires that you read a whole text to get > > its number of characters ! > > Personally I find the requirement to know the number of characters in a text > rather unusual, so I wouldn't base a decision for an encoding on that. In > fact, I cannot remember ever really wanting to know the actual number of > characters in a text. The number of bytes occupied on storage, ok. The > number of letters, of words, of lines, perhaps even the number of printable > characters, all potentially interesting, depending on the application. > But the raw number of characters? I don't know what that might serve for.
Also note that the UTF-32 Unicode encoding would offer this property, but with the following disadvantages compared to the UTF-8 Unicode encoding: - 7bit ASCII is not a subset of UTF-32 losing a lot of compatibility (code 7bit ASCII with some UTF-8 in the comments is no problem for not-Unicode aware systems except for slight misdisplayments of the comments) - UTF-32 has up to 4 times the size of UTF-8
There's also the point that you can use e.g. "wc" or your editor for counting the characters.
> HTH > Tilman
cu Adrian
--
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