Re: default value of degree_sign on Japanese env.

[Shigeharu T. <sh...@ie...>]

shige 11/04 2011
----------------

Ethan A Merritt <sf...@us...> wrote:
| I have revised the new code to use iconv() if it is available.
| I tested under linux by setting the locale to ja_JP.EUC-JP,
| which causes it to emit the character sequence \241 \353 (octal)
| which is 0xA1EB (hexidecimal).  But I don't have any EUC-JP fonts
| installed, so I cannot confirm if this is correct.

The code 0xA1EB is correct for EUC-JP.

Well, I think the idea

+    if (locale) { 
+       /* This should work even if gnuplot doesn't understand the encoding */
+       char *encoding = strchr(locale, '.');
+       if (encoding) {
+           encoding++; /* Step past the dot in, e.g., ja_JP.EUC-JP */

of src/set.c is not so good, since substrings of locale name 
after '.' may not proper name of the character encoding. For 
example, in Solaris 9,

  EUC-JP enconding locale name = "ja", "ja_JP.EUC", "ja_JP.eucJP"
  Shift_JIS encoding locale name = "ja_JP.PCK"
  UTF-8 encoding locale name = "ja_JP.UTF-8"

To obtain encoding codeset name of current locale, there seems to
be two methods:

1) Use nl_langinfo(CODESET) (#include <langinfo.h>)
2) Use locale_charset() (#include <localcharset.h>) in libcharset,
  which is included in GNU libiconv.

cf. http://www.haible.de/bruno/packages-libcharset.html

On Solaris 9, nl_langinfo(CODESET) of system library returns:

  locale = ja, ja_JP.eucJP => "eucJP"
  locale = ja_JP.PCK => "PCK"

and locale_charset() of GNU libcharset returns:

  locale = ja, ja_JP.eucJP => "EUC-JP"
  locale = ja_JP.PCK => "SHIFT_JIS"

I think that names returned by locale_charset() may be better,
but libcharset may not be installed in default. 


| If you build the new code, you can test it by saying
|    set encoding locale
|    show decimal

Though it puts a incorrect string on "ja" locale, it works fine
on "ja_JP.eucJP" locale since iconv library admits "eucJP".

+========================================================+
 Shigeharu TAKENO     NIigata Institute of Technology
                       kashiwazaki,Niigata 945-1195 JAPAN
 sh...@ie...   TEL(&FAX): +81-257-22-8161
+========================================================+