NAME¶
Encode::Supported -- Encodings supported by Encode
DESCRIPTION¶
Encoding Names¶
Encoding names are case insensitive. White space in names is ignored. In
addition, an encoding may have aliases. Each encoding has one
"canonical" name. The "canonical" name is chosen from the
names of the encoding by picking the first in the following sequence (with a
few exceptions).
- •
- The name used by the Perl community. That includes 'utf8' and 'ascii'.
Unlike aliases, canonical names directly reach the method so such
frequently used words like 'utf8' don't need to do alias lookups.
- •
- The MIME name as defined in IETF RFCs. This includes all
"iso-"s.
- •
- The name in the IANA registry.
- •
- The name used by the organization that defined it.
In case
de jure canonical names differ from that of the Encode module,
they are always aliased if it ever be implemented. So you can safely tell if a
given encoding is implemented or not just by passing the canonical name.
Because of all the alias issues, and because in the general case encodings have
state, "Encode" uses an encoding object internally once an operation
is in progress.
Supported Encodings¶
As of Perl 5.8.0, at least the following encodings are recognized. Note that
unless otherwise specified, they are all case insensitive (via alias) and all
occurrence of spaces are replaced with '-'. In other words, "ISO 8859
1" and "iso-8859-1" are identical.
Encodings are categorized and implemented in several different modules but you
don't have to "use Encode::XX" to make them available for most
cases. Encode.pm will automatically load those modules on demand.
Built-in Encodings¶
The following encodings are always available.
Canonical Aliases Comments & References
----------------------------------------------------------------
ascii US-ascii ISO-646-US [ECMA]
ascii-ctrl Special Encoding
iso-8859-1 latin1 [ISO]
null Special Encoding
utf8 UTF-8 [RFC2279]
----------------------------------------------------------------
null and
ascii-ctrl are special. "null" fails for all
character so when you set fallback mode to PERLQQ, HTMLCREF or XMLCREF, ALL
CHARACTERS will fall back to character references. Ditto for
"ascii-ctrl" except for control characters. For fallback modes, see
Encode.
Encode::Unicode -- other Unicode encodings¶
Unicode coding schemes other than native utf8 are supported by Encode::Unicode,
which will be autoloaded on demand.
----------------------------------------------------------------
UCS-2BE UCS-2, iso-10646-1 [IANA, UC]
UCS-2LE [UC]
UTF-16 [UC]
UTF-16BE [UC]
UTF-16LE [UC]
UTF-32 [UC]
UTF-32BE UCS-4 [UC]
UTF-32LE [UC]
UTF-7 [RFC2152]
----------------------------------------------------------------
To find how (UCS-2|UTF-(16|32))(LE|BE)? differ from one another, see
Encode::Unicode.
UTF-7 is a special encoding which "re-encodes" UTF-16BE into a 7-bit
encoding. It is implemented separately by Encode::Unicode::UTF7.
Encode::Byte -- Extended ASCII¶
Encode::Byte implements most single-byte encodings except for Symbols and
EBCDIC. The following encodings are based on single-byte encodings implemented
as extended ASCII. Most of them map \x80-\xff (upper half) to non-ASCII
characters.
- ISO-8859 and corresponding vendor mappings
- Since there are so many, they are presented in table format with languages
and corresponding encoding names by vendors. Note that the table is sorted
in order of ISO-8859 and the corresponding vendor mappings are slightly
different from that of ISO. See
<http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html> for details.
Lang/Regions ISO/Other Std. DOS Windows Macintosh Others
----------------------------------------------------------------
N. America (ASCII) cp437 AdobeStandardEncoding
cp863 (DOSCanadaF)
W. Europe iso-8859-1 cp850 cp1252 MacRoman nextstep
hp-roman8
cp860 (DOSPortuguese)
Cntrl. Europe iso-8859-2 cp852 cp1250 MacCentralEurRoman
MacCroatian
MacRomanian
MacRumanian
Latin3[1] iso-8859-3
Latin4[2] iso-8859-4
Cyrillics iso-8859-5 cp855 cp1251 MacCyrillic
(See also next section) cp866 MacUkrainian
Arabic iso-8859-6 cp864 cp1256 MacArabic
cp1006 MacFarsi
Greek iso-8859-7 cp737 cp1253 MacGreek
cp869 (DOSGreek2)
Hebrew iso-8859-8 cp862 cp1255 MacHebrew
Turkish iso-8859-9 cp857 cp1254 MacTurkish
Nordics iso-8859-10 cp865
cp861 MacIcelandic
MacSami
Thai iso-8859-11[3] cp874 MacThai
(iso-8859-12 is nonexistent. Reserved for Indics?)
Baltics iso-8859-13 cp775 cp1257
Celtics iso-8859-14
Latin9 [4] iso-8859-15
Latin10 iso-8859-16
Vietnamese viscii cp1258 MacVietnamese
----------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Esperanto, Maltese, and Turkish. Turkish is now on 8859-9.
[2] Baltics. Now on 8859-10, except for Latvian.
[3] TIS 620 + Non-Breaking Space (0xA0 / U+00A0)
[4] Nicknamed Latin0; the Euro sign as well as French and Finnish
letters that are missing from 8859-1 were added.
All cp* are also available as ibm-*, ms-*, and windows-* . See also
<http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html>.
Macintosh encodings don't seem to be registered in such entities as IANA.
"Canonical" names in Encode are based upon Apple's Tech Note
1150. See <http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html> for
details.
- KOI8 - De Facto Standard for the Cyrillic world
- Though ISO-8859 does have ISO-8859-5, the KOI8 series is far more popular
in the Net. Encode comes with the following KOI charsets. For gory
details, see <http://czyborra.com/charsets/cyrillic.html>
----------------------------------------------------------------
koi8-f
koi8-r cp878 [RFC1489]
koi8-u [RFC2319]
----------------------------------------------------------------
gsm0338 - Hentai Latin 1¶
GSM0338 is for GSM handsets. Though it shares alphanumerals with ASCII, control
character ranges and other parts are mapped very differently, mainly to store
Greek characters. There are also escape sequences (starting with 0x1B) to
cover e.g. the Euro sign.
This was once handled by Encode::Bytes but because of all those unusual
specifications, Encode 2.20 has relocated the support to Encode::GSM0338. See
Encode::GSM0338 for details.
- gsm0338 support before 2.19
- Some special cases like a trailing 0x00 byte or a lone 0x1B byte are not
well-defined and decode() will return an empty string for them. One
possible workaround is
$gsm =~ s/\x00\z/\x00\x00/;
$uni = decode("gsm0338", $gsm);
$uni .= "\xA0" if $gsm =~ /\x1B\z/;
Note that the Encode implementation of GSM0338 does not implement the reuse
of Latin capital letters as Greek capital letters (for example, the 0x5A
is U+005A (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z), not U+0396 (GREEK CAPITAL LETTER
ZETA).
The GSM0338 is also covered in Encode::Byte even though it is not an
"extended ASCII" encoding.
CJK: Chinese, Japanese, Korean (Multibyte)¶
Note that Vietnamese is listed above. Also read "Encoding vs Charset"
below. Also note that these are implemented in distinct modules by countries,
due to the size concerns (simplified Chinese is mapped to 'CN', continental
China, while traditional Chinese is mapped to 'TW', Taiwan). Please refer to
their respective documentation pages.
- Encode::CN -- Continental China
-
Standard DOS/Win Macintosh Comment/Reference
----------------------------------------------------------------
euc-cn [1] MacChineseSimp
(gbk) cp936 [2]
gb12345-raw { GB12345 without CES }
gb2312-raw { GB2312 without CES }
hz
iso-ir-165
----------------------------------------------------------------
[1] GB2312 is aliased to this. See L<Microsoft-related naming mess>
[2] gbk is aliased to this. See L<Microsoft-related naming mess>
- Encode::JP -- Japan
-
Standard DOS/Win Macintosh Comment/Reference
----------------------------------------------------------------
euc-jp
shiftjis cp932 macJapanese
7bit-jis
iso-2022-jp [RFC1468]
iso-2022-jp-1 [RFC2237]
jis0201-raw { JIS X 0201 (roman + halfwidth kana) without CES }
jis0208-raw { JIS X 0208 (Kanji + fullwidth kana) without CES }
jis0212-raw { JIS X 0212 (Extended Kanji) without CES }
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Encode::KR -- Korea
-
Standard DOS/Win Macintosh Comment/Reference
----------------------------------------------------------------
euc-kr MacKorean [RFC1557]
cp949 [1]
iso-2022-kr [RFC1557]
johab [KS X 1001:1998, Annex 3]
ksc5601-raw { KSC5601 without CES }
----------------------------------------------------------------
[1] ks_c_5601-1987, (x-)?windows-949, and uhc are aliased to this.
See below.
- Encode::TW -- Taiwan
-
Standard DOS/Win Macintosh Comment/Reference
----------------------------------------------------------------
big5-eten cp950 MacChineseTrad {big5 aliased to big5-eten}
big5-hkscs
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Encode::HanExtra -- More Chinese via CPAN
- Due to the size concerns, additional Chinese encodings below are
distributed separately on CPAN, under the name Encode::HanExtra.
Standard DOS/Win Macintosh Comment/Reference
----------------------------------------------------------------
big5ext CMEX's Big5e Extension
big5plus CMEX's Big5+ Extension
cccii Chinese Character Code for Information Interchange
euc-tw EUC (Extended Unix Character)
gb18030 GBK with Traditional Characters
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Encode::JIS2K -- JIS X 0213 encodings via CPAN
- Due to size concerns, additional Japanese encodings below are distributed
separately on CPAN, under the name Encode::JIS2K.
Standard DOS/Win Macintosh Comment/Reference
----------------------------------------------------------------
euc-jisx0213
shiftjisx0123
iso-2022-jp-3
jis0213-1-raw
jis0213-2-raw
----------------------------------------------------------------
Miscellaneous encodings¶
- Encode::EBCDIC
- See perlebcdic for details.
----------------------------------------------------------------
cp37
cp500
cp875
cp1026
cp1047
posix-bc
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Encode::Symbols
- For symbols and dingbats.
----------------------------------------------------------------
symbol
dingbats
MacDingbats
AdobeZdingbat
AdobeSymbol
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Encode::MIME::Header
- Strictly speaking, MIME header encoding documented in RFC 2047 is more of
encapsulation than encoding. However, their support in modern world is
imperative so they are supported.
----------------------------------------------------------------
MIME-Header [RFC2047]
MIME-B [RFC2047]
MIME-Q [RFC2047]
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Encode::Guess
- This one is not a name of encoding but a utility that lets you pick up the
most appropriate encoding for a data out of given suspects. See
Encode::Guess for details.
Unsupported encodings¶
The following encodings are not supported as yet; some because they are rarely
used, some because of technical difficulties. They may be supported by
external modules via CPAN in the future, however.
- ISO-2022-JP-2 [RFC1554]
- Not very popular yet. Needs Unicode Database or equivalent to implement
encode() (because it includes JIS X 0208/0212, KSC5601, and GB2312
simultaneously, whose code points in Unicode overlap. So you need to
lookup the database to determine to what character set a given Unicode
character should belong).
- ISO-2022-CN [RFC1922]
- Not very popular. Needs CNS 11643-1 and -2 which are not available in this
module. CNS 11643 is supported (via euc-tw) in Encode::HanExtra. Audrey
Tang may add support for this encoding in her module in future.
- Various HP-UX encodings
- The following are unsupported due to the lack of mapping data.
'8' - arabic8, greek8, hebrew8, kana8, thai8, and turkish8
'15' - japanese15, korean15, and roi15
- Cyrillic encoding ISO-IR-111
- Anton Tagunov doubts its usefulness.
- ISO-8859-8-1 [Hebrew]
- None of the Encode team knows Hebrew enough (ISO-8859-8, cp1255 and
MacHebrew are supported because and just because there were mappings
available at <http://www.unicode.org/>). Contributions welcome.
- ISIRI 3342, Iran System, ISIRI 2900 [Farsi]
- Ditto.
- Thai encoding TCVN
- Ditto.
- Vietnamese encodings VPS
- Though Jungshik Shin has reported that Mozilla supports this encoding, it
was too late before 5.8.0 for us to add it. In the future, it may be
available via a separate module. See
<http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/intl/uconv/ucvlatin/vps.uf>
and
<http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/intl/uconv/ucvlatin/vps.ut>
if you are interested in helping us.
- Various Mac encodings
- The following are unsupported due to the lack of mapping data.
MacArmenian, MacBengali, MacBurmese, MacEthiopic
MacExtArabic, MacGeorgian, MacKannada, MacKhmer
MacLaotian, MacMalayalam, MacMongolian, MacOriya
MacSinhalese, MacTamil, MacTelugu, MacTibetan
MacVietnamese
The rest which are already available are based upon the vendor mappings at
<http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/> .
- (Mac) Indic encodings
- The maps for the following are available at
<http://www.unicode.org/> but remain unsupported because those
encodings need an algorithmical approach, currently unsupported by
enc2xs:
MacDevanagari
MacGurmukhi
MacGujarati
For details, please see "Unicode mapping issues and notes:" at
<http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/DEVANAGA.TXT>
.
I believe this issue is prevalent not only for Mac Indics but also in other
Indic encodings, but the above were the only Indic encodings maps that I
could find at <http://www.unicode.org/> .
Encoding vs. Charset -- terminology¶
We are used to using the term (character)
encoding and
character
set interchangeably. But just as confusing the terms byte and character
is dangerous and the terms should be differentiated when needed, we need to
differentiate
encoding and
character set.
To understand that, here is a description of how we make computers grok our
characters.
- •
- First we start with which characters to include. We call this collection
of characters character repertoire.
- •
- Then we have to give each character a unique ID so your computer can tell
the difference between 'a' and 'A'. This itemized character repertoire is
now a character set.
- •
- If your computer can grow the character set without further processing,
you can go ahead and use it. This is called a coded character
set (CCS) or raw character encoding. ASCII is used this way for
most cases.
- •
- But in many cases, especially multi-byte CJK encodings, you have to tweak
a little more. Your network connection may not accept any data with the
Most Significant Bit set, and your computer may not be able to tell if a
given byte is a whole character or just half of it. So you have to
encode the character set to use it.
A character encoding scheme (CES) determines how to encode a given
character set, or a set of multiple character sets. 7bit ISO-2022 is an
example of a CES. You switch between character sets via escape
sequences.
Technically, or mathematically, speaking, a character set encoded in such a CES
that maps character by character may form a CCS. EUC is such an example. The
CES of EUC is as follows:
- •
- Map ASCII unchanged.
- •
- Map such a character set that consists of 94 or 96 powered by N members by
adding 0x80 to each byte.
- •
- You can also use 0x8e and 0x8f to indicate that the following sequence of
characters belongs to yet another character set. To each following byte is
added the value 0x80.
By carefully looking at the encoded byte sequence, you can find that the byte
sequence conforms a unique number. In that sense, EUC is a CCS generated by a
CES above from up to four CCS (complicated?). UTF-8 falls into this category.
See "UTF-8" in perlUnicode to find out how UTF-8 maps Unicode to a
byte sequence.
You may also have found out by now why 7bit ISO-2022 cannot comprise a CCS. If
you look at a byte sequence \x21\x21, you can't tell if it is two !'s or
IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE. EUC maps the latter to \xA1\xA1 so you have no trouble
differentiating between "!!". and " ".
Encoding Classification (by Anton Tagunov and Dan Kogai)¶
This section tries to classify the supported encodings by their applicability
for information exchange over the Internet and to choose the most suitable
aliases to name them in the context of such communication.
- •
- To (en|de)code encodings marked by "(**)", you need
"Encode::HanExtra", available from CPAN.
Encoding names
US-ASCII UTF-8 ISO-8859-* KOI8-R
Shift_JIS EUC-JP ISO-2022-JP ISO-2022-JP-1
EUC-KR Big5 GB2312
are registered with IANA as preferred MIME names and may be used over the
Internet.
"Shift_JIS" has been officialized by JIS X 0208:1997.
"Microsoft-related naming mess" gives details.
"GB2312" is the IANA name for "EUC-CN". See
"Microsoft-related naming mess" for details.
"GB_2312-80"
raw encoding is available as
"gb2312-raw" with Encode. See Encode::CN for details.
EUC-CN
KOI8-U [RFC2319]
have not been registered with IANA (as of March 2002) but seem to be supported
by major web browsers. The IANA name for "EUC-CN" is
"GB2312".
KS_C_5601-1987
is heavily misused. See "Microsoft-related naming mess" for details.
"KS_C_5601-1987"
raw encoding is available as
"kcs5601-raw" with Encode. See Encode::KR for details.
UTF-16 UTF-16BE UTF-16LE
are IANA-registered "charset"s. See [RFC 2781] for details. Jungshik
Shin reports that UTF-16 with a BOM is well accepted by MS IE 5/6 and NS 4/6.
Beware however that
- •
- "UTF-16" support in any software you're going to be
using/interoperating with has probably been less tested then
"UTF-8" support
- •
- "UTF-8" coded data seamlessly passes traditional command piping
("cat", "more", etc.) while "UTF-16" coded
data is likely to cause confusion (with its zero bytes, for example)
- •
- it is beyond the power of words to describe the way HTML browsers encode
non-"ASCII" form data. To get a general impression, visit
<http://www.alanflavell.org.uk/charset/form-i18n.html>. While
encoding of form data has stabilized for "UTF-8" encoded pages
(at least IE 5/6, NS 6, and Opera 6 behave consistently), be sure to
expect fun (and cross-browser discrepancies) with "UTF-16"
encoded pages!
The rule of thumb is to use "UTF-8" unless you know what you're doing
and unless you really benefit from using "UTF-16".
ISO-IR-165 [RFC1345]
VISCII
GB 12345
GB 18030 (**) (see links below)
EUC-TW (**)
are totally valid encodings but not registered at IANA. The names under which
they are listed here are probably the most widely-known names for these
encodings and are recommended names.
BIG5PLUS (**)
is a proprietary name.
Microsoft products misuse the following names:
- KS_C_5601-1987
- Microsoft extension to "EUC-KR".
Proper names: "CP949", "UHC", "x-windows-949"
(as used by Mozilla).
See
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-charsets/2001AprJun/0033.html>
for details.
Encode aliases "KS_C_5601-1987" to "cp949" to reflect
this common misusage. Raw "KS_C_5601-1987" encoding is
available as "kcs5601-raw".
See Encode::KR for details.
- GB2312
- Microsoft extension to "EUC-CN".
Proper names: "CP936", "GBK".
"GB2312" has been registered in the "EUC-CN" meaning at
IANA. This has partially repaired the situation: Microsoft's
"GB2312" has become a superset of the official
"GB2312".
Encode aliases "GB2312" to "euc-cn" in full agreement
with IANA registration. "cp936" is supported separately.
Raw "GB_2312-80" encoding is available as
"gb2312-raw".
See Encode::CN for details.
- Big5
- Microsoft extension to "Big5".
Proper name: "CP950".
Encode separately supports "Big5" and "cp950".
- Shift_JIS
- Microsoft's understanding of "Shift_JIS".
JIS has not endorsed the full Microsoft standard however. The official
"Shift_JIS" includes only JIS X 0201 and JIS X 0208 character
sets, while Microsoft has always used "Shift_JIS" to encode a
wider character repertoire. See "IANA" registration for
"Windows-31J".
As a historical predecessor, Microsoft's variant probably has more rights
for the name, though it may be objected that Microsoft shouldn't have used
JIS as part of the name in the first place.
Unambiguous name: "CP932". "IANA" name (also used by
Mozilla, and provided as an alias by Encode): "Windows-31J".
Encode separately supports "Shift_JIS" and "cp932".
Glossary¶
- character repertoire
- A collection of unique characters. A character set in the strictest
sense. At this stage, characters are not numbered.
- coded character set (CCS)
- A character set that is mapped in a way computers can use directly. Many
character encodings, including EUC, fall in this category.
- character encoding scheme (CES)
- An algorithm to map a character set to a byte sequence. You don't have to
be able to tell which character set a given byte sequence belongs. 7-bit
ISO-2022 is a CES but it cannot be a CCS. EUC is an example of being both
a CCS and CES.
- charset (in MIME context)
- has long been used in the meaning of "encoding", CES.
While the word combination "character set" has lost this meaning
in MIME context since [RFC 2130], the "charset" abbreviation has
retained it. This is how [RFC 2277] and [RFC 2278] bless
"charset":
This document uses the term "charset" to mean a set of rules for
mapping from a sequence of octets to a sequence of characters, such
as the combination of a coded character set and a character encoding
scheme; this is also what is used as an identifier in MIME "charset="
parameters, and registered in the IANA charset registry ... (Note
that this is NOT a term used by other standards bodies, such as ISO).
[RFC 2277]
- EUC
- Extended Unix Character. See ISO-2022.
- ISO-2022
- A CES that was carefully designed to coexist with ASCII. There are a 7 bit
version and an 8 bit version.
The 7 bit version switches character set via escape sequence so it cannot
form a CCS. Since this is more difficult to handle in programs than the 8
bit version, the 7 bit version is not very popular except for iso-2022-jp,
the de facto standard CES for e-mails.
The 8 bit version can form a CCS. EUC and ISO-8859 are two examples thereof.
Pre-5.6 perl could use them as string literals.
- UCS
- Short for Universal Character Set. When you say just UCS, it means
Unicode.
- UCS-2
- ISO/IEC 10646 encoding form: Universal Character Set coded in two
octets.
- Unicode
- A character set that aims to include all character repertoires of the
world. Many character sets in various national as well as industrial
standards have become, in a way, just subsets of Unicode.
- UTF
- Short for Unicode Transformation Format. Determines how to map a
Unicode character into a byte sequence.
- UTF-16
- A UTF in 16-bit encoding. Can either be in big endian or little endian.
The big endian version is called UTF-16BE (equal to UCS-2 + surrogate
support) and the little endian version is called UTF-16LE.
See Also¶
Encode, Encode::Byte, Encode::CN, Encode::JP, Encode::KR, Encode::TW,
Encode::EBCDIC, Encode::Symbol Encode::MIME::Header, Encode::Guess
References¶
- ECMA
- European Computer Manufacturers Association
<http://www.ecma.ch>
- IANA
- Internet Assigned Numbers Authority <http://www.iana.org/>
- Assigned Charset Names by IANA
- <http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets>
Most of the "canonical names" in Encode derive from this list so
you can directly apply the string you have extracted from MIME header of
mails and web pages.
- ISO
- International Organization for Standardization
<http://www.iso.ch/>
- RFC
- Request For Comments -- need I say more?
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/>, <http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html>,
<http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/>
- UC
- Unicode Consortium <http://www.unicode.org/>
Other Notable Sites¶
- czyborra.com
- <http://czyborra.com/>
Contains a lot of useful information, especially gory details of ISO vs.
vendor mappings.
- CJK.inf
- <http://examples.oreilly.com/cjkvinfo/doc/cjk.inf>
Somewhat obsolete (last update in 1996), but still useful. Also try
<ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/examples/nutshell/cjkv/pdf/GB18030_Summary.pdf>
You will find brief info on "EUC-CN", "GBK" and mostly
on "GB 18030".
- Jungshik Shin's Hangul FAQ
- <http://jshin.net/faq>
And especially its subject 8.
<http://jshin.net/faq/qa8.html>
A comprehensive overview of the Korean ("KS *") standards.
- debian.org: "Introduction to i18n"
- A brief description for most of the mentioned CJK encodings is contained
in
<http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ch-codes.en.html>
Offline sources¶
- "CJKV Information Processing" by Ken Lunde
- CJKV Information Processing 1999 O'Reilly & Associates, ISBN :
1-56592-224-7
The modern successor of "CJK.inf".
Features a comprehensive coverage of CJKV character sets and encodings along
with many other issues faced by anyone trying to better support CJKV
languages/scripts in all the areas of information processing.
To purchase this book, visit
<http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514471/> or your favourite
bookstore.