Software Internationalization Guide

Software Characteristics That Vary by Locale
Software Internationalization Guide—526225-002
2-9
Encoding Methods
Encoding Methods
Encoding methods provide a way to mix characters from different code sets so that
users can use characters from multiple languages. For example, the Extended UNIX
Codes (EUC) and personal computer (PC) codes mix ASCII, local phonetic, and
ideographic characters in one data stream.
Extended UNIX Codes
EUC is commonly used for UNIX-based systems. EUC supports commonly mixed
languages such as English and Chinese, English and Japanese, or English and
Korean.
Personal Computer (PC) Codes
PC codes are typically the standard for personal computers in a given country. For
example, PC codes such as Japan’s Shift-JIS and China’s Big 5 are popular on East
Asian personal computers.
Character Data Types
A data type is part of a variable declaration that determines the kind of values a
variable can represent, the operations that can be performed on a variable, and the
amount of storage to allocate. Internationalization creates a demand for processing
multibyte data because many computer language implementations support the
Figure 2-8. Relationship Between Code Sets
ISO 10646 (UCS-2)/Unicode
ISO 8859-1
ASCII
VST009.vsd