Re: [Koha-devel] Re: MARC character encoding

[paul POULAIN]

Ed Summers a écrit:
> Hi Paul:
> On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 03:20:47PM +0100, paul POULAIN wrote:
> > Could someone explain how to translate the "MARC21" charset to a more 
> > convenient one (and which is more convenient ?)
> > Same question for UNIMARC (which is ISO646 if my docs are right)
> >   
> If we lived in a perfect world we would all be using Unicode (UTF8)
> since it covers so many of the worlds scripts [1]. Unfortunately the
> world is not perfect. MARC has been around longer than Unicode, so 
> MARC-8 character encoding to allow non Latin scripts to live in MARC 
> records. I guess the world has bigger problems than character encodings
> (Mr George Bush comes to mind), but I'll leave that particular problem
> alone :)
50% of your news here are related to Mr George Bush.
Unfortunately for me, the other 50% are NOT related to character encoding
:-)))
> I wasn't aware that UNIMARC had defined a different standard for
> character encoding. Isn't ISO646 just an synonym for ASCII? [2] Which docs 
> describe the character sets used in UNIMARC?
No, you're right. ISO646 IS Ascii.
What i don't understand is how they code >127 codes on 2 digits.
for example,  \xc3\x65 = ê
It's not ASCII ?
> > I tried MARC-Charset, which seems to translate from "MARC21" to UNICODE, 
> > but i don't know what to do with my unicode ;-(
> >   
> Yes, MARC::Charset is an implementation of the MARC-8 ==> Unicode
> (UTF-8) mappings published by the Library of Congress. [3] In MARC-8
> there is a special way of 'escaping' to other character sets (Hebrew,
> Cyrillic, East-Asian, etc).
this special way is \xc3\x65 ?
> >   
> You mapped all the UNIMARC fields to MARC fields!?! I was under the
> impression that this was quite a big undertaking to do completely. Is
> your code currently checked into CVS? Having a UNIMARC filter in
> MARC::Record (MARC::File::UNIMARC) has been a long term goal. Maybe we
> could roll this work into the MARC::Record package?
NO, of course. You're right, this is a BIG job.
I did this only for a few fields/subfields I needed (around 20-25 fields)
It's a 10-20 lines script (+ the mapping array) with MARC::Record
>
- 
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)