Kaixo! On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 03:07:25PM -0000, stephen.holmes(a)eircom.net wrote: Yes, the problem is the "\" used by big5 (big5 encoding is a very bad encoding for programmers). Previous versions of GNU gettext didn't have any notion of charset; they handled only sequences of bytes; and "\" had a special meaning, so it had to be escaped (wirtten as "\\") when part of a mutlibyte big5 char. The result was that po files were not in big5, but in a bizarre encoding similar to big5 but incompatible with it... Now, newer versions of gettext know about charsets, and they can see *chars* instead of bytes; and they can detect invalid byte sequences for a given charset. Those new versions require that real big5 be used. The new versions of GNU gettext are better, as the allow using real big5 encoding, that is, the po files can be read and edit with any text editor; which is a big plus. PS: note that the produced *.mo file are the same in both cases; so you can keep a copy of old msgfmt, and convert the files with: msgfmt.old -o tmpfile foo.po msgunfmt -o foo.po tmpfile Note also that the encoding used for the po files is independent of the encoding used to display the text to the user (gettext does the conversion if needed); so you can use utf-8 for the po files if you want. It is also adviced to not put the encoding name in the file name; that is, the po files should be named zh_TW.po and zh_CN.po and not zh_TW.Big5.po or zh_CN.GB2312.po. The use of "zh" alone should be avoided too, as it is completly ambiguous, it doesn't allow to know if it is traditionnal or simplified Chinese. -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Pinpoint the right security solution for your company- Learn how to add 128- bit encryption and to authenticate your web site with VeriSign's FREE guide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yQix2C/33_CAA/yigFAA/23wwlB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: i18n-chinese-unsubscribe(a)egroups.com URL to this group: http://www.egroups.com/group/i18n-chinese Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/