[I18n-sig] International Components for Unicode

Martin v. Loewis martin@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de
Sun, 24 Jun 2001 00:26:27 +0200


> The one thing from ICU that would be useful is the plethora of
> encoding tables it comes with. If we had support for their tables we
> would have access to several hundred (last I checked they had over 600
> encodings) encodings immediately available, and they would be
> responsible for updating them.

That's true, but I'd rather prefer to integrate the encodings that
come with the operating systems first. E.g. on Unix, iconv(3) will
also give you many encodings. Including aliases, glibc 2.2 provides
about 1100 encodings.

On Windows, some Internet/ActiveX API offers a huge variety of
encodings, if the administrator has chosen to install them.

If you have Tcl, it provides a number of converters that are not
currently included in Python.

All these encodings can be made available to Python users by just
installing an extension module; whereas with ICU, you'd have to
install some huge library.

Regards,
Martin