siliconmike wrote:
All I know is that there are 8 bit numbers from 0 to 255 mapped to
characters like A, B, C, D and some strange looking ones (like the ones
used to make boxes in old PC text modes) all these being called ASCII
characters.
So, what in a nutshell does "character sets" mean and how are they
helpful in displaying multiple languages ?
Any simple explanation?
Mike
Someone else here might correct me but I'm pretty sure I know... and
you're near enough correct.
A standard character set (at least where the western world is concerned)
uses values 1 to 127 for the characters on your keyboard. An example is
A is 65, B is 66, C is 67 and so on... a (lowercase A) is 97... b is 98
and so on... All the numbers, alphabetic characters (upper/lower case)
and the characters above your numbers (on a QWERTY keyboard) are, among
a few others, included in this character set.
In order to allow for 'foreign' character sets, there is room for
additional characters from 128 to 255. (By foreign I don't mean to
offend anyone but I cannot think of any other word forit - sorry). This
128-255 in the character set I believe is used for characters that
don't follow what I've mentioned. For example, some of the Nordic
countries in Europe I believe have a letter that looks like a numeric
zero (I think they have an O with a slash that goes through it).
France, Spain and Germany are a few too which have dashes, apostraphes
or carats (^) above some of their characters. In order to allow for
this, they would have a value stored somewhere from 128 to 255 in the
appropriate character set. If you include the extra dashes, apostraphes
or whatever above some alphabets in foreign countries as being seperate
characters then you could *almost* say that some of these countries have
more than 26 letters in their alphabet...
Does this help / answer your question?
randelld
