vijay
vijay

Reputation: 89

difference between iso-8859 and iso-8859-1,

is iso-8859 supports for latin character are i need to use iso-8859-1 in java program to read file in chinese character,and what is the difference between this

Upvotes: 6

Views: 9333

Answers (2)

whjou
whjou

Reputation: 156

There are several encodings available for chinese (e.g. simplified and traditional). See http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/intl/encoding.doc.html for a list. The most common ones are GB2312 aka EUC_CN for simplified chinese and Big5 for traditional chinese. I've also seen chinese documents represented in UTF-8.

Upvotes: 0

eumiro
eumiro

Reputation: 213025

ISO-8859 is a standard for 8-bit character encodings. 8 bits give you 256 combinations which is OK for most extensions of the Latin alphabet but not for Chinese characters.

ISO-8859-1 is one of the "versions" of ISO-8859 supporting most Western-European languages (French, German, Spanish,...). For Central-European languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak,...) you need ISO-8859-2, etc.

One of the different points between ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-2 is the French letter è in ISO-8859-1, which is at the same position as the Czech/Slovak letter č in ISO-8859-2. That's why you could not combine these two letters in one text then.

Now with the Unicode it is possible to combine Chinese characters too.

Upvotes: 15

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