[Zope] Using Chinese Characters

[David Trudgett]

At 2000-09-07 21:18 +0200, Tino Wildenhain <tino@wildenhain.de> wrote:

>Hi Kelvin,
>
>Kelvin Cheong wrote:
> >
> > i was wondering how i can use chinese characters with Zpe on Linux. does
> > anyone know how? According to my "mild" research so far, i found out that
> > Big5is a 2-byte code and is a part of ISO-10646/Unicode. It also seems to
> > be the de-facto for traditional chinese characters. There're also Unicode
> > CJK and GB. But GB is for China, which uses simplified chinese characters.
> > And CJK includes both Big5 and GB.
>
>classic zope is built on python 1.52 and does not naturally support
>unicode.
>But there is a light on the horizont:
>
>http://www.zope.org/Members/htrd/wstring
>
>I have a vision of everything working together for localizing and
>internationalisation ;-)

It's good to finally see some Unicode support coming through. I'm a bit 
surprised that Guido didn't mandate Unicode support from the beginning, 
given that Python is a relative newcomer to the programming scene. I 
imagine Python 2 will have full Unicode support, right? Or is it already in 
Python 1.6?

Bad news is that Unicode is not good enough. It allows for about 64k 
characters, yet Chinese alone (Han ideographs) has over 75,000 (maybe a lot 
more, but that includes old, rare and uncommon characters). When will we 
see support for UCS (Universal Character System, ISO 10646) which uses (up 
to) 32 bit (31 bit?) characters. As far as I know, at present the only UCS 
characters currently defined are those defined by Unicode (about 40,000 of 
them), but we should be supporting it now in readiness for the future.

Food for thought.

Zai jian!  (Too bad email is plain ASCII or I could use the proper characters!)


David Trudgett