(keitai-l) Re: shift-jis on i-mode

From: Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net>
Date: 09/22/04
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0409221832170.657@angelic-vtfw.cvpn.cynic.net>
On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, nick may wrote:

> AFAIK (which is not very far) there is no internet standard covering
> hankaku (half width katakana) in email.

Yes there is. It's the MIME standard. If you specify a character set
encoding that includes half-width katakana, they will work in e-mail.

You're probably just remembering that the ISO-2022-JP character set
encoding, which is probably the most common Japanese character set
encoding used for e-mail, does not include half-width katakana.

UTF-8 has pretty broad support in mail clients now, and does include
half-width Katakana.

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Renfield Kuroda wrote:

> Shift-jis, on the other hand, uses single-byte (7-bit) for ascii
> characters and half-width katakana, and double-byte encoding for Japanese
> characters, where the first byte of the Japanese character indicates if it
> is the first byte of a double-byte character or not (by being 8-bit.)

Actually, the "bottom half" is the standard 7-bit ASCII character set
encoding, but the half-width katakana is in the "top half," and has the
eighth bit set. So this is not 7-bit.

While it's correct to say that all full-width characters have the eighth
bit set on the first byte, it's not correct that this is an indication
that it's a full-width character. Some half-width characters also have
the eighth bit set.

What you described sounds a little bit like the UTF-8 character set
encoding, where anything without the eighth bit set is standard ASCII,
and all multibyte sequences for non-ASCII characters have their eight
bit set.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs_at_cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
     Make up enjoying your city life...produced by BIC CAMERA
Received on Wed Sep 22 12:39:03 2004