Re: when will HDF5 support Unicode?

• To: netcdf-hdf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: Re: when will HDF5 support Unicode?
• From: Quincey Koziol <koziol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 11:17:10 -0600 (CST)

[ Charset ISO-8859-1 unsupported, converting... ]
> On 2003.12.18 10:30 Ed Hartnett wrote:
> > Howdy HDF5 Guys!
> > 
> > When will Unicode be supported in HDF5?
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > 
> > Ed
> > 
> 
> What does this entail? I'm assuming this is that same as HDF string types,
> with all the features. The only difference is the encoding and the width of
> charaters.
> 
> What about unicode H5T_CHAR class?
    Probably not.

> I would think the work is:
> 
>    * an official HDF name for a sub-class of H5T_STRING, whatever is needed
>       to support that
    We currently have a 'H5T_cset_t' enum (with only H5T_CSET_ASCII defined
currently) for setting the character set encoded in a string (with the
H5Tset_cset routine), so I wouldn't make a new class of string, I would just
add the new character set encoding.

>    * conversion between ASCII and Unicode?
>    * tests
>    * update dumper and other key tools
    The rest of this is sensible.

> Is there anything else?
    We are waving around the term "Unicode" like we know what it means and I'm
pretty certain it is more complex than we think.  This article gives a
reasonable overview from a software developer's position:
    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

    We should decide which character sets we are going to try to support and
then find some open source software which performs conversions between ASCII
and Unicode strings - I don't think we want to be in that business.

    Quincey

• References:
  • Re: when will HDF5 support Unicode?
    • From: Robert E. McGrath