Re: problems with german umlauts

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, Jonathan Henkelman 
<address@hidden> writes
> Mats Bengtsson <mats.bengtsson <at> ee.kth.se> writes:
>
> > You are mistaken. ASCII only defines character codes up to 127, see for
> > example http://www.asciitable.com/.
> > What your table shows is probably Latin1 (ISO 8859-1).
> >
> >    /Mats
>
> Mats: FYI I am using an ascii table in my "little black pocket ref." which
> does not differentiate between standard and extended table.  Also I use the
> one provided in MS Word.  It allows you to pick between Unicode (various
> subsets) ASCII hex and decimal, but it also does not differentiate between
> extended and basic.
>
> What I am hearing hear in the larger context is that the "basic" ASCII set is
> only 127 characters while what I am used to using is actually one of a number
> of extended character sets...

Exactly. What you call "basic ASCII" is the character set that everybody 
agrees about - for example 32=space, 65="A". The problem with "extended 
ASCII", ie between 128 and 255, is that *nobody* *agrees* what those 
characters mean. In other words, it's NOT A STANDARD.
> > UTF-8 is the only way to write both in danish AND french on the same text...
>
> On my machine I can write a single ascii text document (using the full table)
> that is in german, spanish, danish, norwegian, french, english.
What character set are you using? It's all very well saying you can 
*write* a document in those languages, but there is NO GUARANTEE that 
anybody else will be able to READ that document! (Not unless you use 
something like UTF-8, that is ...)

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden