Tcl Built-In Commands encoding(1T)
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NAME
encoding - Manipulate encodings
SYNOPSIS
encoding option ?arg arg ...?
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INTRODUCTIONStrings in Tcl are encoded using 16-bit Unicode characters.
Different operating system interfaces or applications maygenerate strings in other encodings such as Shift-JIS. The
encoding command helps to bridge the gap between Unicode and
these other formats.DESCRIPTION
Performs one of several encoding related operations, depend-
ing on option. The legal options are:encoding convertfrom ?encoding? data
Convert data to Unicode from the specified encoding.
The characters in data are treated as binary data wherethe lower 8-bits of each character is taken as a single
byte. The resulting sequence of bytes is treated as astring in the specified encoding. If encoding is not
specified, the current system encoding is used.
encoding convertto ?encoding? string
Convert string from Unicode to the specified encoding.
The result is a sequence of bytes that represents theconverted string. Each byte is stored in the lower 8-
bits of a Unicode character. If encoding is not speci-
fied, the current system encoding is used.
encoding names
Returns a list containing the names of all of theencodings that are currently available.
encoding system ?encoding?
Set the system encoding to encoding. If encoding is
omitted then the command returns the current systemencoding. The system encoding is used whenever Tcl
passes strings to system calls.EXAMPLE
It is common practice to write script files using a texteditor that produces output in the euc-jp encoding, which
represents the ASCII characters as singe bytes and Japanese characters as two bytes. This makes it easy to embedliteral strings that correspond to non-ASCII characters by
Tcl Last change: 8.1 1Tcl Built-In Commands encoding(1T)
simply typing the strings in place in the script. However, because the source command always reads files using thecurrent system encoding, Tcl will only source such files
correctly when the encoding used to write the file is the
same. This tends not to be true in an internationalized setting. For example, if such a file was sourced in NorthAmerica (where the ISO8859-1 is normally used), each byte in
the file would be treated as a separate character that maps to the 00 page in Unicode. The resulting Tcl strings will not contain the expected Japanese characters. Instead, theywill contain a sequence of Latin-1 characters that
correspond to the bytes of the original string. The encod-
ing command can be used to convert this string to the expected Japanese Unicode characters. For example,set s [encoding convertfrom euc-jp "\xA4\xCF"]
would return the Unicode string "\u306F", which is the Hira-
gana letter HA.SEE ALSO
Tcl_GetEncoding(3TCL)
KEYWORDSencoding
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attri-
butes:_______________________________________
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE|
|____________________|__________________|_
| Availability | runtime/tcl-8 |
|____________________|__________________|_
| Interface Stability| Uncommitted ||____________________|_________________|
NOTES Source for Tcl is available on http://opensolaris.org. Tcl Last change: 8.1 2