Re: making "玄奘" say "Xuanzang" in chinese

[Miles Bader]

Joe Corneli <jcorneli <at> math.utexas.edu> writes:
>  (defun w3m-ucs-to-char (codepoint)
>    (or (decode-char 'ucs codepoint) ?~))
> 
> But keeping the function around wasn't helping either.  Except, when I
> tried it again, it worked, so I must have gotten something wrong.
> 
> This code seems a little more readable than the code you
> supplied...  but they seem to have the same effect.

Hmmm, I missed that; yeah, `decode-char' does look much nicer ... :-)

> Can you suggest something that will work on this content from the
> gnu.org homepage?  Neither the w3m code nor your code seems to produce
> human readable output on this stuff (maybe I'm missing some fonts or
> something?).  I get a bunch of control-at characters... (oh yeah,
> after modifying the "[0-9]" to be ".....".
> 
>   [ Az <at> rbaycanca | Bahasa Indonesia | Bosanski | Catal`
>   | &#x7b80;&#x4f53;&#x4e2d;&#x6587; |
>   &#x7e41;&#x9ad4;&#x4e2d;&#x6587; | Cesky | Dansk |

Presumably the "x" following &# means "hex", so you should use the BASE argument
to string-to-number if you see it.

The following tweak to your original code seems to generate reasonable output:

  (while (re-search-forward "&#\\(x\\)?\\([0-9a-f]+\\);" nil t)
    (let ((ucs (string-to-number (match-string 2)
                                 (if (match-beginning 1) 16 10))))
    (delete-region (match-beginning 0) (match-end 0))
    (insert-char (decode-char 'ucs ucs) 1)))

[The trick to select decimal or hex works because `match-beginning' returns nil
for optional parenthesized expressions which didn't match.]

-Miles